LogFAQs > #931809477

For a change of pace, not that I imagine any of this comes to a surprise to anyone, the NYT got ahold of some data from a location data company that covered 12 million cellphones focused in a handful of cities like DC, NYC, and San Francisco over a period of a year and despite only having that small slice of data from a single company they showed what you could do with this information:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html

All of this information was "anonymized" but they explain it's laughably trivial to put names to these data points even with what they had - let alone to companies or actors who have access to other data sets to supplement it. They tracked a senior Defense Department official to the Women's March in DC, to an event with Obama in 2017, high schools, friends' houses, military bases. They could ID and track protestors at the inauguration. And the police present.

They observed a Microsoft engineer, saw a change in his daily routine and saw he made a single visit to Amazon's Seattle campus and one month later he was working with Amazon. They could track journalists too and could see them on trips to motels.

And of course once they ID someone, they could use the data to see what they were doing months before and after that point and basically map out their lives.

And the entire industry is basically unregulated.

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