I think most of us are aware of the fact that location privacy is non-existent, if you have your phone with you.
But it bears repeating..not even the President of the United States is immune to having his movements tracked.
Not to mention your kids..you...those you love...people who work in sensitive positions..all can be tracked..and risk having their sensitive data stolen. A thief can track his victim..so can a kidnapper or a stalker..so can a foreign intelligence agent.
Opinion | How to Track President Trump
The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country. It was a random sample from 2016 and 2017, but it took only minutes — with assistance from publicly available information — for us to deanonymize location data and track the whereabouts of President Trump.
Americans have grown eerily accustomed to being tracked throughout their digital lives. But it’s far from their fault. It’s a result of a system in which data surveillance practices are hidden from consumers and in which much of the collection of information is done without the full knowledge of the device holders.
Freaked Out?
3 Steps to Protect Your Phone
For the nation’s security agencies, however, privacy is critical to the safety of military, defense and security operations across the country and abroad. If threats to that privacy have seemed abstract in the past, the trove of location data we have analyzed has brought them into sharp relief. Military and intelligence officials have long been concerned about how their movements could be exposed; now every move is. As a senior Defense Department official told Times Opinion, even the Pentagon has told employees to expect that their privacy is compromised:
“We want our people to understand: They should make no assumptions about anonymity. You are not anonymous on this planet at this point in our existence. Everyone is trackable, traceable, discoverable to some degree.”
We were able to track smartphones in nearly every major government building and facility in Washington. We could follow them back to homes and, ultimately, their owners’ true identities. Even a prominent senator’s national security adviser — someone for whom privacy and security are core to their every working day — was identified and tracked in the data.
What can you do?
Opinion | Freaked Out? 3 Steps to Protect Your Phone
You can do only so much. Location vendors are engaged in a race to find new ways to ferret out your devices, regardless of whether you followed the steps above. Some will try to identify you using your device type, I.P. address, screen size and even volume and screen brightness, in a process called “fingerprinting.”
Your mobile carrier also collects location pings while your phone is turned on, regardless of whether you followed the steps above. Telecom companies were recently caught selling that data to companies that then resold it to bounty hunters, who used it to find phones in real time. The telecom companies have since pledged to stop selling the data, but they still collect it.
Real protections will come only if federal laws are passed to limit what companies can do with the data they collect. Until then, no matter what settings we choose, we’re all at risk.
But it bears repeating..not even the President of the United States is immune to having his movements tracked.
Not to mention your kids..you...those you love...people who work in sensitive positions..all can be tracked..and risk having their sensitive data stolen. A thief can track his victim..so can a kidnapper or a stalker..so can a foreign intelligence agent.
Opinion | How to Track President Trump
The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country. It was a random sample from 2016 and 2017, but it took only minutes — with assistance from publicly available information — for us to deanonymize location data and track the whereabouts of President Trump.
Americans have grown eerily accustomed to being tracked throughout their digital lives. But it’s far from their fault. It’s a result of a system in which data surveillance practices are hidden from consumers and in which much of the collection of information is done without the full knowledge of the device holders.
Freaked Out?
3 Steps to Protect Your Phone
For the nation’s security agencies, however, privacy is critical to the safety of military, defense and security operations across the country and abroad. If threats to that privacy have seemed abstract in the past, the trove of location data we have analyzed has brought them into sharp relief. Military and intelligence officials have long been concerned about how their movements could be exposed; now every move is. As a senior Defense Department official told Times Opinion, even the Pentagon has told employees to expect that their privacy is compromised:
“We want our people to understand: They should make no assumptions about anonymity. You are not anonymous on this planet at this point in our existence. Everyone is trackable, traceable, discoverable to some degree.”
We were able to track smartphones in nearly every major government building and facility in Washington. We could follow them back to homes and, ultimately, their owners’ true identities. Even a prominent senator’s national security adviser — someone for whom privacy and security are core to their every working day — was identified and tracked in the data.
What can you do?
Opinion | Freaked Out? 3 Steps to Protect Your Phone
You can do only so much. Location vendors are engaged in a race to find new ways to ferret out your devices, regardless of whether you followed the steps above. Some will try to identify you using your device type, I.P. address, screen size and even volume and screen brightness, in a process called “fingerprinting.”
Your mobile carrier also collects location pings while your phone is turned on, regardless of whether you followed the steps above. Telecom companies were recently caught selling that data to companies that then resold it to bounty hunters, who used it to find phones in real time. The telecom companies have since pledged to stop selling the data, but they still collect it.
Real protections will come only if federal laws are passed to limit what companies can do with the data they collect. Until then, no matter what settings we choose, we’re all at risk.
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