Remember the uproar about smartphone location tracking ~10 years ago? That battle was won, right? Nope. Well done interactive piece by the NYT here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm. In the cities that the data file covers, it tracks people from nearly every neighborhood and block, whether they live in mobile homes in Alexandria, Va., or luxury towers in Manhattan. One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely. If you lived in one of the cities the dataset covers and use apps that share your location — anything from weather apps to local news apps to coupon savers — you could be in there, too. If you could see the full trove, you might never use your phone the same way again.
This isn't big brother if big brother is the government. Those innocent-looking apps you have that you allow tracking when it's in use.... that data can be sold legally. You may be tracked meticulously and there may be a data set out there that knows everything about your movement.
It's easier for big breh to buy a subscription than file a warrant. Or they can get a secret warrant to force the service provider to provide backdoor access. Snowden has been calling it even after all his years in exile. He did a fascinating interview on Rogan. I wonder if I could muster up that extent of courage and sacrifice.
They would need a warrant to legally watch. But as @Invisible Fan points out, they could avoid that by buying the data. And of course, that means anyone could buy the data as well.
We gave away our rights with the Patriot Act so these companies tracking anything afterwards is just icing on the cake.
