The Insurrection and the Faustian Bargain
Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, reporting for The New York Times:
Surrendering our privacy to the government would be foolish enough. But what is more insidious is the Faustian bargain made with the marketing industry, which turns every location ping into currency as it is bought and sold in the marketplace of surveillance advertising.
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A source has provided [The New York Times with] another data set, this time following the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Donald Trump’s political rally turned into a violent insurrection.
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The sacking of the Capitol was a shocking assault on the republic and an unwelcome reminder of the fragility of American democracy. But history reminds us that sudden events — Pearl Harbor, the Soviet Union testing an atomic bomb, the Sept. 11 attacks — have led to an overreach in favor of collective security over individual liberty that we’d later regret. And more generally, the data collected on Jan. 6 is a demonstration of the looming threat to our liberties posed by a surveillance economy that monetizes the movements of the righteous and the wicked alike.
The data we were given showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day. It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol exactly when Trump supporters were storming the building.
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The data presented here is a bird’s-eye view of an event that posed a clear and grave threat to our democracy. But it tells a second story as well: One of a broken, surreptitious industry in desperate need of regulation, and of a tacit agreement we’ve entered into that threatens our individual privacy. None of this data should ever have been collected.
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This collection will only grow more sophisticated. This new data set offers proof that not only is there more interest in location data than before, but it is also easier to deanonymize. It gets easier by the day. As the data from Jan. 6 eerily demonstrates, it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.
In our previous investigation, we wrote that Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.
Excellent reporting, you should really read the full article. For additional context, also check out their 2019 piece, “One Nation, Tracked” as well as CopyrightBro’s commentary on it.
The thing to understand here is that it wasn’t just the insurrectionists at the Capitol that were being tracked, and they weren’t specifically targeted for this tracking beforehand. Granted, they’re probably a little bit stupider on average than most Americans, but probably not to the extent that they were more susceptible to the tracking and data collection that made it possible for a private company to compile all this information and recreate minute-by-minute itineraries of their little field trip to D.C.
Everyone’s phones (Android devices to a greater degree than iPhones, but still) are collecting troves of data about their lives and their behavior, practically at all times, and turning it over to creepy companies you’ve never heard of that can sell it or use it themselves to do astoundingly unethical, privacy-invasive shit like what we’ve seen here. Sure, there are some settings you can change to make it harder for them to spy on you, and CopyrightBro is committed to helping you understand what you can do, but this problem is too big to be solved by any amount of accountability journalism, hard hitting exposés from the New York Times, or even attempts by well intentioned companies like Apple to pressure their competitors to play by a fair, understandable set of rules. This problem requires sweeping regulation.