The incongruity between the robust legal regime around legacy methods of privacy invasion and the paucity of regulation around more comprehensive and intrusive modern technologies has come into sharp relief in an investigation into the location data industry by Times Opinion. The investigation, which builds on work last year by The Time's newsroom, was based on a dataset provided to Times Opinion by sources alarmed by the power of the tracking industry. The largest such file known to have been examined by journalists, it reveals more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans across several major cities.
By analyzing these pings, our journalists were able to track the movements of President Trump's Secret Service guards and of senior Pentagon officials. They could follow protesters to their homes and stalk high-school students across Los Angeles. In most cases, it was child's play for them to connect a supposedly anonymous data trail to a name and an address — to a real live human being.
The collection, aggregation, and sale of personal location data needs to be be banned. Location is yet another way in which we've become the product technology companies are selling.