The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers. 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. One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. 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. It originated from a location data company, one of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software slipped onto mobile phone apps. The Times and other news organizations have reported on smartphone tracking in the past.
But never with a data set so large. Freaked Out? Now, as the decade ends, tens of millions of Americans, including many children, find themselves carrying spies in their pockets during the day and leaving them beside their beds at night — even though the corporations that control their data are far less accountable than the government would be. Then we went to tell them. In the United States, as in most of the world, no federal law limits what has become a vast and lucrative trade in human tracking.
Only internal company policies and the decency of individual employees prevent those with access to the data from, say, stalking an estranged spouse or selling the evening commute of an intelligence officer to a hostile foreign power. Companies say the data is shared only with vetted partners. Closer to home, on a smaller yet no less troubling scale, there are often few protections to stop an individual analyst with access to such data from tracking an ex-lover or a victim of abuse.
The companies that collect all this information on your movements justify their business on the basis of three claims: People consent to be tracked, the data is anonymous and the data is secure. Yes, the location data contains billions of data points with no identifiable information like names or email addresses. The data included more than 10, smartphones tracked in Central Park. Here are all pings from that smartphone over the period covered by the data. Note: Driving path is inferred.
Data has been additionally obscured. In most cases, ascertaining a home location and an office location was enough to identify a person. Consider your daily commute: Would any other smartphone travel directly between your house and your office every day? Seen an abuse of data? We want to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, contact us on a secure line at , charliewarzel on Wire or email Charlie Warzel and Stuart A.
Thompson directly. Yet companies continue to claim that the data are anonymous. In marketing materials and at trade conferences, anonymity is a major selling point — key to allaying concerns over such invasive monitoring. With the help of publicly available information, like home addresses, we easily identified and then tracked scores of notables. We followed military officials with security clearances as they drove home at night. We tracked law enforcement officers as they took their kids to school.
We watched high-powered lawyers and their guests as they traveled from private jets to vacation properties. We did not name any of the people we identified without their permission. We wanted to document the risk of underregulated surveillance. Watching dots move across a map sometimes revealed hints of faltering marriages, evidence of drug addiction, records of visits to psychological facilities. In one case, we identified Mary Millben, a singer based in Virginia who has performed for three presidents, including President Trump. She remembers how, surrounded by dignitaries and the first family, she was moved by the music echoing through the recesses of the cathedral while members of both parties joined together in prayer.
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All the while, the apps on her phone were also monitoring the moment, recording her position and the length of her stay in meticulous detail. For the advertisers who might buy access to the data, the intimate prayer service could well supply some profitable marketing insights. Millben told us. That seems a little dangerous to me. Like many people we identified in the data, Ms. Millben said she was careful about limiting how she shared her location. Our privacy is only as secure as the least secure app on our device.
It is disturbing.
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The inauguration weekend yielded a trove of personal stories and experiences: elite attendees at presidential ceremonies, religious observers at church services, supporters assembling across the National Mall — all surveilled and recorded permanently in rigorous detail. Protesters were tracked just as rigorously. Examining just a photo from the event, you might be hard-pressed to tie a face to a name. But in our data, pings at the protest connected to clear trails through the data, documenting the lives of protesters in the months before and after the protest, including where they lived and worked.
His wife was also on the mall that day, something we discovered after tracking him to his home in Virginia. Her phone was also beaming out location data, along with the phones of several neighbors. Inauguration Day weekend was marked by other protests — and riots. Hundreds of protesters, some in black hoods and masks, gathered north of the National Mall that Friday, eventually setting fire to a limousine near Franklin Square.
The data documented those rioters, too. Filtering the data to that precise time and location led us to the doorsteps of some who were there. Police were present as well, many with faces obscured by riot gear. The data led us to the homes of at least two police officers who had been at the scene.
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As revealing as our searches of Washington were, we were relying on just one slice of data, sourced from one company, focused on one city, covering less than one year. Location data companies collect orders of magnitude more information every day than the totality of what Times Opinion received.
We lacked the mobile advertising IDs or other identifiers that advertisers often combine with demographic information like home ZIP codes, age, gender, even phone numbers and emails to create detailed audience profiles used in targeted advertising. When datasets are combined, privacy risks can be amplified. Whatever protections existed in the location dataset can crumble with the addition of only one or two other sources. There are dozens of companies profiting off such data daily across the world — by collecting it directly from smartphones, creating new technology to better capture the data or creating audience profiles for targeted advertising.
Many use technical and nuanced language that may be confusing to average smartphone users. While many of them have been involved in the business of tracking us for years, the companies themselves are unfamiliar to most Americans. Companies can work with data derived from GPS sensors, Bluetooth beacons and other sources. Not all companies in the location data business collect, buy, sell or work with granular location data. Location data companies generally downplay the risks of collecting such revealing information at scale.
He added that Factual does not resell detailed data like the information we reviewed. In absence of a federal privacy law, the industry has largely relied on self-regulation. Several industry groups offer ethical guidelines meant to govern it. Factual joined the Mobile Marketing Association , along with many other data location and marketing companies, in drafting a pledge intended to improve its self-regulation.
The pledge is slated to be released next year. States are starting to respond with their own laws. The California Consumer Protection Act goes into effect next year and adds new protections for residents there, like allowing them to ask companies to delete their data or prevent its sale. But aside from a few new requirements, the law could leave the industry largely unencumbered.
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The companies are required to disclose very little about their data collection. By law, companies need only describe their practices in their privacy policies, which tend to be dense legal documents that few people read and even fewer can truly understand. In truth, sensitive information can be easily transferred or leaked, as evidenced by this very story. But location data is different.
Our precise locations are used fleetingly in the moment for a targeted ad or notification, but then repurposed indefinitely for much more profitable ends, like tying your purchases to billboard ads you drove past on the freeway. Many apps that use your location, like weather services, work perfectly well without your precise location — but collecting your location feeds a lucrative secondary business of analyzing, licensing and transferring that information to third parties.
For many Americans, the only real risk they face from having their information exposed would be embarrassment or inconvenience. But for others, like survivors of abuse, the risks could be substantial. And who can say what practices or relationships any given individual might want to keep private, to withhold from friends, family, employers or the government? We found hundreds of pings in mosques and churches, abortion clinics, queer spaces and other sensitive areas.
In one case, we observed a change in the regular movements of a Microsoft engineer. And of course as a result it will chew through battery life. You can test this by using your battery in another phone of the same model and compare the results. Is your phone using more battery power than a phone of the same model and software? Call and message alerts to one side your phone should be as silent as a sleeping baby when not in use.
Does it also reboot for no reason at all? Before a smart phone shuts down it must complete any tasks that are processing. If your phone is transmitting data to someone it will have to complete the process before it shuts down.
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As a result if a phone takes longer than usual to turn off especially after a call, text, email or web browsing it could be sending information to a third party. A further indicator of a possible phone tap is the temperature of your battery.
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However this is only a potential sign.