An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry

Instead of expecting that nothing tracks you until you permit it.

FWIW: This 'ability' is not specific for Iphone

Even if person had an anonymous SIM it would be trivial to identify them by the locations where they spent most of their time.

> THE DATA REVIEWED BY TIMES OPINION didn’t come from a telecom or giant tech company, nor did it come from a governmental surveillance operation. 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.

Is your suggestion that the NYT wait until every large tech company leaks their databases to their reporters?

Not sure if this is only for EU citizens.

Panama Papers, Paradise Papers. Very little has come out of this and it's so disappointing. What this says to me is that enough of the people powerful enough to change any of it are in on it. Or, there just isn't the critical mass at the bottom, and this, where we find ourselves as a global population, is the stability between comfort and outrage.

The "Or" above, maybe should be an "And".

I wonder whether one of the reasons that seemingly illogical conservatism is as successful as it is, is because the bigger the world economy gets, and the larger the population, the harder it is to change anything meaningful without wiping out a pillar-sized part of the economy, the results of which are too unpredictable for anyone in power to want to take responsibility for.

This position only leads to further conservatism, in that any changes 'we let pass' must be war-gamed to the nth degree to ensure they don't cause societal collapse.

I'm not conservative, but the above is almost the only way I can process seemingly illogical conservatism that is actually anything other than "maintaining the status quo because I'm part of it". It's almost believing their own FUD. Hubbard-style. But it might not be entirely wrong.

I remember the day some years ago when my favorite paper (not US based) claimed it would try to still report critically about Facebook even while they are engaged in a cooperation and how such a market situation could be detrimental to independent news covering.

They needed to do that because these sites mainly drive engagement. Today, they also write a lot about the hot button topics of today, which isn't any different than boulevard really. They still have good content, but that doesn't put the meals on their table anymore.

> news in the last few years is how stories that used to have international, severe impact and political repercussions just drift off into the ether now.

Wait, so you're relying on news organizations to provide detailed investigations into how companies abuse their power. Isn't that why we elect government officials?

I sometimes joke here that A/B testing is how Satan interacts with this world. With each passing day, it seems less and less like a joke, though. And in all honesty, data science itself is fine - the problem is that some thing should not be optimized beyond a point.

One thing that could use a lot more press is what companies do with this information. Many people who know they have it believe it to be harmless.

Nothing against snark, but I'm confused with what you're saying here. Are you implying that the NYT and media in general have not covered Google and other companies' threats to privacy? Or are you arguing that they haven't covered it enough, and your metric for this, ostensibly, is that these companies still exist and/or no one has been imprisoned or otherwise heavily sanctioned?

I ask because the story under discussion is explicitly not an investigation of illegal activity, but more the revelation/explanation of how closely our lives can be surveilled via smartphone through our consent. The article outright says that what's being described isn't illegal:

> Today, it’s perfectly legal to collect and sell all this information. 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. 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.

– and let's face it, if the authors hadn't emphasized this, half of us here would be ripping the authors for dishonest hype and clickbait for trying to "fool" the public into an outrage.

> One of the most amazing things about the news in the last few years is how stories that used to have international, severe impact and political repercussions just drift off into the ether now. No follow-up, no continuing coverage.

Given your opening statement, it's hard for me to know if this is an empirical assessment based on what you've observed, or whether your ability to pay attention to unfolding investigations/scandals are unreasonably dampened by skepticism and unreasonable impatience. This year alone we've seen severe and international repercussions from the Epstein scandal, which was catalyzed by Julie Brown, a Miami reporter who had been following him for years, long enough to know to keep digging when Trump's nominated labor secretary happened to be the Florida prosecutor who gave Epstein his sweet 2010 deal. I assume, like most people, you are dissatisfied that Epstein suddenly died before the possibility of a trial. Are you under the impression that journalists, including Brown, have dropped looking into Epstein? Or that something/anything should be happening faster and more noticeable to you and the public?

The reality is, many investigations happen (especially at the local level) that do effect important change, but after the initial public outrage and sanctions, if the change perpetuates, its through years-long process of policy and legislation, which you aren't likely to notice (almost by definition, if something is fixed, we take it for granted) The press itself is not given the power to directly make that change itself, and I think this is acceptable by anyone (i.e. just about everyone who is not part of the press) who hates the phenomenon of "trial by press".

All that said, I am curious what exemplary investigations you have in mind that, back in the better days, met your standard for to speedy, significant, and systemic change? For the U.S. press, Watergate is still seen as the gold standard for a major impact investigation. It took a more than 2 years from the break-in to when Nixon resigned in 1974. In that span, Nixon won re-election by the biggest landslide in American history, and many people who experienced this period would be justified (until 1974) into thinking Watergate amounted to very little.

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https://outline.com/nVTtcg

> In this and subsequent articles we’ll reveal what we’ve found and why it has so shaken us.

"In most cases, ascertaining a home location and an office location was enough to identify a person. Consider your daily commute: Would any other smartphone travel directly between your house and your office every day?"

Then they back it up with:

"With the help of publicly available information, like home addresses, we easily identified and then tracked scores of notables."

And provided the specific example of Mary Millben.

It was manual and not automated, but the tech details of finding work and home addresses, based on the two most visited spots, seems not novel. Similar for extrapolating that into a name.