Spying: Massive Global Phone Location Databases Bought and Sold Cell/GPS/WiFi/LAN

[grarpamp]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833718

In addition to former WiFi maps...

Every 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. The Times Privacy
Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive
ever to be reviewed by journalists. 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. The New York Times: Each piece of
information in this file represents the precise location of a single
smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. 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. 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. After 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. 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.

One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy
Mansion, some overnight. 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. 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. If you could see the full
trove, you might never use your phone the same way again.



Severed fibre cables disrupted internet access in eastern Europe, Iran, Turkey
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50851420
https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/tech-companies-slap-back-at-the-n-s-a-s-smiley-face
https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2019/12/01/suspected-internet-cable-spy-ship-operating-in-americas/
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/19/federal-reserve-bank-glitch-delayed-bank-account-deposits.html