Why wouldn’t you believe this was happening? Facebook bought a VPN provider with the explicit purpose of spying on its users and both Facebook and Google convinced users to use what was suppose to be an internal Enterprise Certificate to track users until Apple threaten to cancel the certificate.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-unblocks-googl...

But Twitter had been tracking apps installed on a users iPhone until Apple restricted access to the API that they used.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/twitter-is-now-tracking-the...

The purpose of the API was for one app to send messages to another app. But it could be used to tell if an app was installed.

For example, if the telco is already getting "a lot more than that from other tech companies", why do they also need Twitter's user location data? I understand "more is more", but the telco in the story sounded desperate to obtain Twitter's data.

I believe it.

A data science company I used to work for got hired in 2017 by a large American telco to handle this exact same sort of data coming from antenna location to do better ad targeting.

The reason why Verizon or AT&T do not have the ad capabilities of Google or Meta is because they are giant incompetent corporations that are incapable of developing anything in any area that didn't exist in the 1980s.

Healthy dose of mistrust is warranted. Still, would it really shock if it were true? In my eyes, it would only confirm what I already know.

which part seems unbelievable to you?

2015 to be precise, which is fairly late in the game. I was at a conference a few years prior to that and some guy was bragging about all the stuff they can find out about people based on their data this and data that.

There is some obsession amongst a subset of techies with knowing everything, and that extends to the daily minutiae of the lives of others.