We get permanently tracked by our phones… and they don’t even try to hide it! Like me you probably receive on a regular basis a Google Maps recap of the previous month. At the start I found those emails quite creepy, now I guess I got used to them.
Nevertheless this excellent New York Time visualization ‘ONE NATION, TRACKED: an investigation into the smartphone tracking industry‘ shows the extend it takes when applied to the entire population.
The most interesting part is that although the dataset of the location of 12 million phones provided for research is supposed to be anonymous, it proves quite easy to associate a phone with an individual based on his location pattern. Actually it is not quite possible to anonymise a data set of locations.
And the scariest bit – the data did not originate from a phone network provider or a GAFA. 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.“
I encourage you to read and watch the infographics of this paper to really understand what we have all accepted to get into. It would be quite easy for non scrupulous users of the database – or some surveillance state – to know exactly what we are up to.
