The article assumes that the location data must have been collected because he gave an app permission to access his location. I bet they couldn’t figure out which app it was because it wasn’t an app.<p>Cell service providers <i>can</i> and <i>do</i> track your cellphone location. All they have to do is measure the signal strength of your cellphone at different towers, and they can triangulate its position.<p><a href="https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunter-300-dollars-located-phone-microbilt-zumigo-tmobile" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hu...</a><p>I’m not familiar with other locations, but in the US, you only have the choice between three cell service providers. <i>All</i> of them admit to selling their own customer’s location data to third parties in their Privacy Policies.<p>AT&T <a href="https://about.att.com/csr/home/privacy/full_privacy_policy.html" rel="nofollow">https://about.att.com/csr/home/privacy/full_privacy_policy.h...</a><p>Verizon <a href="https://www.verizon.com/about/privacy/full-privacy-policy" rel="nofollow">https://www.verizon.com/about/privacy/full-privacy-policy</a><p>T-Mobile/Sprint <a href="https://www.t-mobile.com/privacy-center/our-practices/privacy-policy" rel="nofollow">https://www.t-mobile.com/privacy-center/our-practices/privac...</a><p>Remember, you’re <i>paying</i> for these services. But they still sell you out.<p>I seriously recommend you read the privacy policy for your provider. It seems they collect as much data as possible (not just location, also browsing history and a whole host of other metrics) and share it with as many different parties as possible.<p>If you are using a cellphone, your location is being tracked. Period. You can’t avoid it. Even TOR isn’t gonna help you.
Many of the apps that sell your location use location as a critical component of the experience. Apple and Google added a permission last year - only allow access to location when app is running (in the foreground). That change has made a dramatic reduction in the amount of location data available.<p>Ultimately, free is the culprit. People like to navigate, buy stuff online, see things on a map, get local weather, and so on - especially if it is free. The old adage about if it is free, you are the product probably applies.
This is one of the reasons why I'm generally not OK with "anonymized" data collection without an explanation of how it's being anonymized. It's almost always easy, often trivially easy, to correlate the data together and basically get a perfect recreation of whatever the original data was back.
Wow, this article is really interesting, but one thing I noticed is that the translation is generated and perfect! In fact if the header weren't there I'd have thought it was written by a native english speaker.
Most likely the users installed one of those free apps that ask for location access.
Those apps collected the location, even when not ruining and uploaded for sale.<p>It is a pity they did not do better forensics on the installed apps. One or more were revealing the location.
The NY Times had a similar article recently: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...</a>
Previous short discussion about a "foot traffic" vendor <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704138" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704138</a>
A question for the Android experts: is it possible to block or spoof location data, through a custom build?<p>Could I have an Android phone running a program that spoofs a long steady drive from Tampa to Butte?
When I saw Foursquare transition from a B2C to a B2B focused company that is when I finally deleted the Swarm and Fourquare Apps. I still don't fully understand their decision to split Foursquare into 2 apps, but what I did/do understand is that there is alot of money to be made in location data. You just hope that the people in these businesses are ethical people.
Isn’t data this granular illegal, at least in the US? Obviously trying to make the data anonymous does nothing if you can still see the same user over time - I’ve only ever seen this data with users put into groups, and data points fuzzed.
Link in the original language:
<a href="https://www.nrk.no/norge/xl/avslort-av-mobilen-1.14911685" rel="nofollow">https://www.nrk.no/norge/xl/avslort-av-mobilen-1.14911685</a>
Can I legally purchase the anonymized location data of a few thousand Americans, run that through a script which associates coordinates with addresses, and publish the deanonymized results as an art piece like this?<p>If so, this could be a lot of fun. It would be interesting to see the political backlash, especially if the published dataset includes politicians. Perhaps, in the name of ethics, it should include <i>only</i> politicians, and only those who have voted against privacy legislation. Maybe we'd finally end up with something like the GDPR here in the States.
You have to be a special case of naive for the collection and sale of data to be a surprise. Talk about living under a rock. As for mobile apps, specifically, you think these shitty apps make money off ads? No, the business model is data. GPS data alone is a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing very fast.
What I don’t get about this kind of thing is that it’s not just shady data resellers you’ve never heard of. It’s also overt, high profile, branded tech companies like Foursquare and Yelp, with huge amassed data sets of foot traffic, wifi scans, battery status, often paired with demographic info or data that can be joined by ad IDs or commercial device graphs.<p>If these companies are able to keep on truckin’ with massive user bases who don’t seem to care that the entire business model rests on flagrant violation of data privacy and data reselling, why would you ever expect anyone to care about the long tail of scammy lesser known data resellers?<p>Companies like Yelp or Foursquare are essentially as scammy as it can possibly be, with the scamminess shoved right in users’ faces, with lots of middle fingers and half-hearted sound bytes about respecting data privacy. If users don’t react in horror and delete accounts / stop contributing en masse in response to that, why would you ever think an expose about something a further ten degrees removed from the user’s immediate experiences is going to cause any reaction?<p>People just don’t care.