One Nation, Tracked
Fantastic reporting from Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel for The New York Times:
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.
It’s about time that publications with big audiences start pounding this drum. Read their whole article, and begin to understand why this matters.
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. […]
That data can then be resold, copied, pirated and abused. There’s no way you can ever retrieve it.
Unfortunately, there’s very little you can do to limit how your location data is shared. It’s important to wrangle in your location sharing settings (check out the “Privacy” section of CopyrightBro’s Digital Health Checkup), but even that isn’t enough to truly protect you. One of the best ways to limit companies’ ability to track you is to route all of your internet traffic through a VPN service. My family and I use ExpressVPN. These are paid services, but at $99/year for 5 devices (ExpressVPN’s best offer), it works out to 5¢ per device per day, which I think is worth the expense.
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 answer here is obviously “no”. Targeted advertising is a user-hostile practice, and it deserves to be heavily regulated, if not outlawed entirely.
Today, it’s perfectly legal to collect and sell all this information. […] 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.
We are living in the world’s most advanced surveillance system. […] It was built to make money. The greatest trick technology companies ever played was persuading society to surveil itself.