Pretty shocking-but-not-shocking report from the NY Times on the grim situation of "voluntary" smartphone surveillance:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...ell-phone.html
Cliffs: Those apps you give permission to use your location are often using a third party service to interpret the location data, and all of that data is stored. The NY Times was able to get a copy of this data file, and found enough data on 12 million smartphones (just a sliver of the overall data stored) to locate every single movement made by each phone owner.
The NY Times used the data to fully track certain people and identify who they were -- something the companies doing it claim is impossible.
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.
To evaluate the companies’ claims, we turned most of our attention to identifying people in positions of power. 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.
Watching dots move across a map sometimes revealed hints of faltering marriages, evidence of drug addiction, records of visits to psychological facilities.
Remember all of the panic during the 2000s and early 2010s regarding the Patriot Act and other government surveillance programs?
Remember when I said that this was no big deal, and that our real danger comes from private companies which we voluntarily or semi-voluntarily allow into our lives?
Well... yeah.