Many companies have emerged based on the location history of people found from their mobile phones. Surprisingly these companies are not minor businesses rather huge industries. An average net worth of these is $12 billion.
This tracking family consists of marketplaces, aggregators, collectors, location intelligence firms. All these work together to get access to a person’s mobile and get hold of their location history, all done with perfection and precision.
According to reports of The Markup, around 47 companies work on trading with location history. A number of firms have given an approximate of their data. While one records ‘the world’s largest dataset of people’s behavior in the real world’ with data of 1.6 billion people from 44 different countries, the other claims that they have amassed the data of almost over 25% of the U.S.’s adult population on a monthly basis.
A firm named Mobilewalla says to have data of more than 40 countries with over 1.9 billion devices having 50 billion signals on a daily basis, collected over a period of five years.
What are the dangers lying behind this?
Definitely, this is not a very safe and secure situation since most of this happens without the knowledge of the user. Justin Sherman, who deals with the cyber policy at the Duke Tech Policy Lab, opined that “There isn’t a lot of transparency and there is a really, really complex shadowy web of interactions between these companies that’s hard to untangle. They operate on the fact that the general public and people in Washington and other regulatory centers aren’t paying attention to what they’re doing.”
Often there are reports on how these apps collect information in dubious manners. Recently Motherboard shed light on such a company. The former reported that X-mode would be using Muslim praying apps to collect location history and would, in turn, sell it to various military contractors. Another example is The Wall Street Journal’s report on Venntel, who is said to be selling such location information to fed agencies. These companies always boast about their authenticity and the fact that they do not sell any of this news as such. But when detailed research was done, their claims were proven absolutely wrong.
The gradual steps of the process
In the first place, through various apps, access is allowed. And mainly, it happens with maps, food apps, transportation apps, online shopping apps, video apps, etc. They need to get the location for imparting knowledge on directions or for deliveries and many more.
But behind the back, as soon as they begin to get the details, the trading of the information starts to those companies that analyze data. And then firms like real estate, retail business, etc., use this information for investment strategies, marketing purposes, and advertisements.
For instance, Burger King came out with an offer that anyone who has their mobile location within 600 feet of McDonald’s would be given a Whopper for only one cent. And, of course, there are various federal agencies like Internal Revenue Service, Customs and Border Protection, U.S. military, etc., which gather information from companies working on tracking mobile phones.
Conclusion
Sherman from the Duke Tech Policy Lab has reported that there were data brokers advertising information on the location history of people based on their political beliefs, U.S government employees as well as military personnel. And this could be openly done because the U.S law has nothing that prevents the trading of location data.
One of the most ironic is the California Consumer Privacy Act, which, on the one hand, has given a free hand on who can purchase the data but, on the other, claims that residents can request not to sell their data.
