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.Ĭompanies say the data is shared only with vetted partners. 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. Today, it’s perfectly legal to collect and sell all this information. 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. 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. In this and subsequent articles we’ll reveal what we’ve found and why it has so shaken us. “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.”
But there is,” said William Staples, founding director of the Surveillance Studies Research Center at the University of Kansas. “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. 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. 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. 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.
It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure the powers such always-on surveillance can provide an authoritarian regime like China’s.
#I got 2 phones one for full#
If you could see the full trove, you might never use your phone the same way again. 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. 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. One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. 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. 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.Īfter 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. 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. 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.Įach piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 20. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero PrivacyĮvery 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.