20200115 Locations of millions of Americans trackable

How to Track President Trump

The mobile phone makes us all more equal - now not quite equal, we are all still far from the president's account balance. But the New York Times reports that every minute of every day, all over the planet, dozens of companies - largely unregulated, little checked - log the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and store the information in gigantic files.

The Times Privacy Project has received one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever reviewed by journalists. It contains more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans moving through several major cities such as Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

All of the information in the file represents the exact location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017, and was provided to The Times by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and were facing severe penalties for doing so. The information sources said that they were alarmed about the possible abuse and wanted to inform the public and legislators urgently.

Well, Edward Snowden* has already done so in 2013 - however, it was the secret services that collect such data (and many more data about our lives). This now is a collection with which private companies spy on us and use the data to calculate our profiles and manipulate us to make orders, purchases and actions.

How deep into the private life of people this information reaches, shows some evaluations by the NY Times

a dozen people visited the Playboy Mansion, some of them overnight,

the visitors of the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger could be identified,

with these people, in turn, their home addresses could be identified by the "centre of life" of their mobile phone,

also almost every child can be followed all day long

The NY Times concludes: "In the last decade since the creation of Apple's App Store, Americans have agreed, app by app, to such a system operated by private companies. Now, at the end of the decade, tens of millions of Americans, many of them children, find themselves with spies in their pockets, lying in their pockets during the day and next to their beds at night..."

Under US law, this data collection is totally legal, the newspaper is concerned when it comes to public figures, especially politicians, and the security interests of the country. Damn it, that can't be all - where is the outcry about the loss of privacy?

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