Cell Phone Tracking

These are the actual locations
for millions of Americans. At the New York

Stock Exchange …
Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD
… in the beachfront neighborhoods
of Los Angeles ...
… in secure facilities like
the Pentagon …
… at the White House …
… and at Mar-a-Lago, President
Trump’s Palm Beach resort.
ONE NATION, TRACKED
A N I N V E S T I G AT I O N I N T O T H E S M A R T P H O N E T R A C K I N G
INDUSTRY FROM TIMES OPINION
Opinion THE PRIVACY PROJECT
Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy
By Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel Dec. 19, 2019
524
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.
Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location

of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and
2017. 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.
[Related: How to Track President Trump — Read more about the

national security risks found in the data.]
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.
A typical day at Grand Central Terminal
in New York City
Satellite imagery: Microsoft
The data reviewed by Times Opinion didn’t come from a telecom or
giant tech company, nor did it come from a governmental
surveillance operation. It originated from a location data company,
one of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software
slipped onto mobile phone apps. You’ve probably never heard of
most of the companies — and yet to anyone who has access to this
data, your life is an open book. They can see the places you go
every moment of the day, whom you meet with or spend the night
with, where you pray, whether you visit a methadone clinic, a
psychiatrist’s office or a massage parlor.
The Times and other news organizations have reported on

smartphone tracking in the past. But never with a data set so large.
Even still, this file represents just a small slice of what’s collected
and sold every day by the location tracking industry —
surveillance so omnipresent in our digital lives that it now seems
impossible for anyone to avoid.
Freaked Out?
3 Steps to Protect Your Phone
It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure the powers such

always-on surveillance can provide an authoritarian regime like
China’s. Within America’s own representative democracy, citizens
would surely rise up in outrage if the government attempted to
mandate that every person above the age of 12 carry a tracking
device that revealed their location 24 hours a day. Yet, in the
decade since Apple’s App Store was created, Americans have, app
by app, consented to just such a system run by private companies.
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.
[Related: Where Even the Children Are Being Tracked — We

followed every move of people in one city. Then we went to tell them.]
“The seduction of these consumer products is so powerful that it
blinds us to the possibility that there is another way to get the
benefits of the technology without the invasion of privacy. But
there is,” said William Staples, founding director of the Surveillance
Studies Research Center at the University of Kansas. “All the
companies collecting this location information act as what I have
called Tiny Brothers, using a variety of data sponges to engage in
everyday surveillance.”
In this and subsequent articles we’ll reveal what we’ve found and
why it has so shaken us. We’ll ask you to consider the national
security risks the existence of this kind of data creates and the
specter of what such precise, always-on human tracking might
mean in the hands of corporations and the government. We’ll also
look at legal and ethical justifications that companies rely on to
collect our precise locations and the deceptive techniques they use
to lull us into sharing it.
Today, it’s perfectly legal to collect and sell all this information. 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. As a

society, we’re choosing simply to take their word for that,
displaying a blithe faith in corporate beneficence that we don’t
extend to far less intrusive yet more heavily regulated industries.
Even if these companies are acting with the soundest moral code
imaginable, there’s ultimately no foolproof way they can secure the
data from falling into the hands of a foreign security service. 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.
A DIARY OF YOUR EVERY MOVEMENT

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.
None of those claims hold up, based on the file we’ve obtained and
our review of company practices.
Yes, the location data contains billions of data points with no
identifiable information like names or email addresses. But it’s
child’s play to connect real names to the dots that appear on the
maps.
Here’s what that looks like.
The data included more
than 10,000 smartphones tracked
in Central Park.
Here is one smartphone, isolated
from the crowd.
Here are all pings from
that smartphone over the period
covered by the data.
Connecting those pings reveals a diary
of the person’s life.
Note: Driving path is inferred. Data has been additionally obscured. Satellite imagery: Maxar Technologies, New York G.I.S., U.S.D.A. Farm Service Agency, Imagery, Landsat/Copernicus and Sanborn.
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?
Describing location data as anonymous is “a completely false

claim” that has been debunked in multiple studies, Paul Ohm, a law
professor and privacy researcher at the Georgetown University
Law Center, told us. “Really precise, longitudinal geolocation
information is absolutely impossible to anonymize.”
“D.N.A.,” he added, “is probably the only thing that’s harder to

anonymize than precise geolocation information.”
[Work in the location tracking industry? 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 440-295-5934, @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.
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.
The data set is large enough that it surely points to scandal and
crime but our purpose wasn’t to dig up dirt. 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.
Connecting a sanitized ping to an actual human in time and place

could feel like reading someone else’s diary.
In one case, we identified Mary Millben, a singer based in Virginia

who has performed for three presidents, including President
Trump. She was invited to the service at the Washington National
Cathedral the morning after the president’s inauguration. That’s
where we first found her.
Mary Millben has performed for three presidents during her singing career. Getty Images
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.
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.
“To know that you have a list of places I have been, and my phone
is connected to that, that’s scary,” Ms. Millben told us. “What’s the
business of a company benefiting off of knowing where I am? 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. Yet like
many of them, she also couldn’t name the app that might have
collected it. Our privacy is only as secure as the least secure app on
our device.
“That makes me uncomfortable,” she said. “I’m sure that makes

every other person uncomfortable, to know that companies can
have free rein to take your data, locations, whatever else they’re
using. It is disturbing.”
The writers of this piece, Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel, are
available to answer your questions.
0 words
CONTINUE »
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. After the pings of

Trump supporters, basking in victory, vanished from the National
Mall on Friday evening, they were replaced hours later by those of
participants in the Women’s March, as a crowd of nearly half a
million descended on the capital. 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.
We spotted a senior official at the Department of Defense walking

through the Women’s March, beginning on the National Mall and
moving past the Smithsonian National Museum of American
History that afternoon. 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.
Senior Defense Department official and his wife identified at the Women’s March
Note: Animated movement of the personʼs location is inferred. Satellite imagery: Microsoft and DigitalGlobe.
The official’s data trail also led to a high school, homes of friends, a
visit to Joint Base Andrews, workdays spent in the Pentagon and a
ceremony at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall with President
Barack Obama in 2017 (nearly a dozen more phones were tracked
there, too).
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.
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.
Data firms also typically draw on other sources of information that

we didn’t use. 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.
The full collection of companies can feel dizzying, as it’s constantly

changing and seems impossible to pin down. 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.)
A Selection of Companies Working

in the Location Data Business
Sources: MightySignal, LUMA Partners and AppFigures.
Location data companies generally downplay the risks of collecting

such revealing information at scale. Many also say they’re not very
concerned about potential regulation or software updates that
could make it more difficult to collect location data.
“No, it doesn’t really keep us up at night,” Brian Czarny, chief

marketing officer at Factual, one such company, said. He added
that Factual does not resell detailed data like the information we
reviewed. “We don’t feel like anybody should be doing that because
it’s a risk to the whole business,” he said.
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.
“If a private company is legally collecting location data, they’re

free to spread it or share it however they want,” said Calli
Schroeder, a lawyer for the privacy and data protection company
VeraSafe.
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.
Beverly Hills, Calif.

Satellite imagery: Microsoft, Vexcel and DigitalGlobe
EVERYTHING CAN BE HACKED

Does it really matter that your information isn’t actually
anonymous? Location data companies argue that your data is safe
— that it poses no real risk because it’s stored on guarded servers.
This assurance has been undermined by the parade of publicly
reported data breaches — to say nothing of breaches that don’t
make headlines. In truth, sensitive information can be easily
transferred or leaked, as evidenced by this very story.
We’re constantly shedding data, for example, by surfing the

internet or making credit card purchases. 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.
The data contains simple information like date, latitude and longitude, making it easy to
inspect, download and transfer. Note: Values are randomized to protect sources and device
owners.
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. He made a visit one Tuesday afternoon to the
main Seattle campus of a Microsoft competitor, Amazon. The
following month, he started a new job at Amazon. It took minutes
to identify him as Ben Broili, a manager now for Amazon Prime
Air, a drone delivery service.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Mr. Broili told us in early December.

“But knowing that you all can get ahold of it and comb through and
place me to see where I work and live — that’s weird.” That we
could so easily discern that Mr. Broili was out on a job interview
raises some obvious questions, like: Could the internal location
surveillance of executives and employees become standard
corporate practice?
Ben Broiliʼs interview at Amazon was captured in the data. Grant Hindsley for The New York Times
Mr. Broili wasn’t worried about apps cataloguing his every move,
but he said he felt unsure about whether the tradeoff between the
services offered by the apps and the sacrifice of privacy was worth
it. “It’s an awful lot of data,” he said. “And I really still don’t
understand how it’s being used. I’d have to see how the other
companies were weaponizing or monetizing it to make that call.”
If this kind of location data makes it easy to keep tabs on

employees, it makes it just as simple to stalk celebrities. Their
private conduct — even in the dead of night, in residences and far
from paparazzi — could come under even closer scrutiny.
Reporters hoping to evade other forms of surveillance by meeting

in person with a source might want to rethink that practice. Every
major newsroom covered by the data contained dozens of pings;
we easily traced one Washington Post journalist through Arlington,
Va.
In other cases, there were detours to hotels and late-night visits to

the homes of prominent people. One person, plucked from the data
in Los Angeles nearly at random, was found traveling to and from
roadside motels multiple times, for visits of only a few hours each
time.
While these pointillist pings don’t in themselves reveal a complete
picture, a lot can be gleaned by examining the date, time and
length of time at each point.
Large data companies like Foursquare — perhaps the most

familiar name in the location data business — say they don’t sell
detailed location data like the kind reviewed for this story but
rather use it to inform analysis, such as measuring whether you
entered a store after seeing an ad on your mobile phone.
But a number of companies do sell the detailed data. Buyers are

typically data brokers and advertising companies. But some of
them have little to do with consumer advertising, including
financial institutions, geospatial analysis companies and real estate
investment firms that can process and analyze such large
quantities of information. They might pay more than $1 million for
a tranche of data, according to a former location data company
employee who agreed to speak anonymously.
Location data is also collected and shared alongside a mobile

advertising ID, a supposedly anonymous identifier about 30 digits
long that allows advertisers and other businesses to tie activity
together across apps. The ID is also used to combine location trails
with other information like your name, home address, email, phone
number or even an identifier tied to your Wi-Fi network.
The data can change hands in almost real time, so fast that your
location could be transferred from your smartphone to the app’s
servers and exported to third parties in milliseconds. This is how,
for example, you might see an ad for a new car some time after
walking through a dealership.
That data can then be resold, copied, pirated and abused. There’s
no way you can ever retrieve it.
Location data is about far more than consumers seeing a few more
relevant ads. This information provides critical intelligence for big
businesses. The Weather Channel app’s parent company, for
example, analyzed users’ location data for hedge funds, according
to a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles this year that was triggered by
Times reporting. And Foursquare received much attention in 2016
after using its data trove to predict that after an E. coli crisis,
Chipotle’s sales would drop by 30 percent in the coming months. Its
same-store sales ultimately fell 29.7 percent.
Much of the concern over location data has focused on telecom

giants like Verizon and AT&T, which have been selling location
data to third parties for years. Last year, Motherboard, Vice’s
technology website, found that once the data was sold, it was being
shared to help bounty hunters find specific cellphones in real time.
The resulting scandal forced the telecom giants to pledge they
would stop selling location movements to data brokers.
Yet no law prohibits them from doing so.
Location data is transmitted from your phone via software

development kits, or S.D.Ks. as they’re known in the trade. The kits
are small programs that can be used to build features within an
app. They make it easy for app developers to simply include
location-tracking features, a useful component of services like
weather apps. Because they’re so useful and easy to use, S.D.K.s
are embedded in thousands of apps. Facebook, Google and
Amazon, for example, have extremely popular S.D.K.s that allow
smaller apps to connect to bigger companies’ ad platforms or help
provide web traffic analytics or payment infrastructure.
But they could also sit on an app and collect location data while
providing no real service back to the app. Location companies may
pay the apps to be included — collecting valuable data that can be
monetized.
“If you have an S.D.K. that’s frequently collecting location data, it is
more than likely being resold across the industry,” said Nick Hall,
chief executive of the data marketplace company VenPath.
Downtown San Francisco

Satellite imagery: Microsoft, DigitalGlobe, Vexcel Imaging, Distribution Airbus
THE ʻHOLY GRAILʼ FOR MARKETERS

If this information is so sensitive, why is it collected in the first
place?
For brands, following someone’s precise movements is key to

understanding the “customer journey” — every step of the process
from seeing an ad to buying a product. It’s the Holy Grail of
advertising, one marketer said, the complete picture that connects
all of our interests and online activity with our real-world actions.
Once they have the complete customer journey, companies know a

lot about what we want, what we buy and what made us buy it.
Other groups have begun to find ways to use it too. Political
campaigns could analyze the interests and demographics of rally
attendees and use that information to shape their messages to try
to manipulate particular groups. Governments around the world
could have a new tool to identify protestors.
Pointillist location data also has some clear benefits to society.

Researchers can use the raw data to provide key insights for
transportation studies and government planners. The City Council
of Portland, Ore., unanimously approved a deal to study traffic and
transit by monitoring millions of cellphones. Unicef announced a
plan to use aggregated mobile location data to study epidemics,
natural disasters and demographics.
For individual consumers, the value of constant tracking is less

tangible. And the lack of transparency from the advertising and
tech industries raises still more concerns.
Does a coupon app need to sell second-by-second location data to

other companies to be profitable? Does that really justify allowing
companies to track millions and potentially expose our private
lives?
Data companies say users consent to tracking when they agree to
share their location. But those consent screens rarely make clear
how the data is being packaged and sold. If companies were clearer
about what they were doing with the data, would anyone agree to
share it?
What about data collected years ago, before hacks and leaks made
privacy a forefront issue? Should it still be used, or should it be
deleted for good?
If it’s possible that data stored securely today can easily be hacked,
leaked or stolen, is this kind of data worth that risk?
Is all of this surveillance and risk worth it merely so that we can be

served slightly more relevant ads? Or so that hedge fund
managers can get richer?
The companies profiting from our every move can’t be expected to

voluntarily limit their practices. Congress has to step in to protect
Americans’ needs as consumers and rights as citizens.
Until then, one thing is certain: We are living in the world’s most
advanced surveillance system. This system wasn’t created
deliberately. It was built through the interplay of technological
advance and the profit motive. It was built to make money. The
greatest trick technology companies ever played was persuading
society to surveil itself.
Stuart A. Thompson (stuart.thompson@nytimes.com) is a

writer and editor in the Opinion section. Charlie Warzel
(charlie.warzel@nytimes.com) is a writer at large for Opinion.
Lora Kelley, Ben Smithgall, Vanessa Swales and Susan Beachy

contributed research. Alex Kingsbury contributed reporting.
Graphics by Stuart A. Thompson. Additional production by
Jessia Ma and Gus Wezerek. Note: Visualizations have been
adjusted to protect device owners.
Opening satellite imagery: Microsoft (New York Stock

Exchange); Imagery (Pentagon, Los Angeles); Google and
DigitalGlobe (White House); Microsoft and DigitalGlobe
(Washington, D.C.); Imagery and Maxar Technologies (Mar-a-
Lago).
Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its

visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail
please see our privacy policy and our publisher's description of
The Times's practices and continued steps to increase
transparency and protections.
COMMENT
ONE NATION, TRACKED

A N I N V E S T I G AT I O N I N T O T H E S M A R T P H O N E T R A C K I N G
INDUSTRY FROM TIMES OPINION
PA R T 1
WHAT WE FOUND
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PROTECT YOURSELF
PA R T 3
NATIONAL SECURITY
PA R T 4
HOW IT WORKS
PA R T 5
ONE NEIGHBORHOOD
PA R T 6
PROTESTS
PA R T 7
SOLUTIONS
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These are the actual locations

for millions of Americans. At the New York

Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy

By Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel Dec. 19, 2019

Each piece of information in this ﬁle represents the precise location

[Related: How to Track President Trump — Read more about the

After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the

One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the

The Times and other news organizations have reported on

It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure the powers such

[Related: Where Even the Children Are Being Tracked — We

Companies say the data is shared only with vetted partners. As a

A DIARY OF YOUR EVERY MOVEMENT

Here’s what that looks like.

In most cases, ascertaining a home location and an ofﬁce location

Describing location data as anonymous is “a completely false

“D.N.A.,” he added, “is probably the only thing that’s harder to

Yet companies continue to claim that the data are anonymous. In

To evaluate the companies’ claims, we turned most of our attention

Connecting a sanitized ping to an actual human in time and place

In one case, we identiﬁed Mary Millben, a singer based in Virginia

She remembers how, surrounded by dignitaries and the ﬁrst family,

“That makes me uncomfortable,” she said. “I’m sure that makes

The inauguration weekend yielded a trove of personal stories and

Protesters were tracked just as rigorously. After the pings of

We spotted a senior ofﬁcial at the Department of Defense walking

As revealing as our searches of Washington were, we were relying

Data ﬁrms also typically draw on other sources of information that

The full collection of companies can feel dizzying, as it’s constantly

While many of them have been involved in the business of tracking

A Selection of Companies Working

Location data companies generally downplay the risks of collecting

“No, it doesn’t really keep us up at night,” Brian Czarny, chief

In absence of a federal privacy law, the industry has largely relied

“If a private company is legally collecting location data, they’re

Beverly Hills, Calif.

EVERYTHING CAN BE HACKED

We’re constantly shedding data, for example, by surﬁng the

In one case, we observed a change in the regular movements of a

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Mr. Broili told us in early December.

If this kind of location data makes it easy to keep tabs on

Reporters hoping to evade other forms of surveillance by meeting

In other cases, there were detours to hotels and late-night visits to

Large data companies like Foursquare — perhaps the most

But a number of companies do sell the detailed data. Buyers are

Location data is also collected and shared alongside a mobile

Much of the concern over location data has focused on telecom

Yet no law prohibits them from doing so.

Location data is transmitted from your phone via software

Downtown San Francisco

THE ʻHOLY GRAILʼ FOR MARKETERS

For brands, following someone’s precise movements is key to

Once they have the complete customer journey, companies know a

Pointillist location data also has some clear beneﬁts to society.

For individual consumers, the value of constant tracking is less

Does a coupon app need to sell second-by-second location data to

Is all of this surveillance and risk worth it merely so that we can be

The companies proﬁting from our every move can’t be expected to