The New York Times is saying that a cell phone company gave them access to 12 million phones that made it possible for them to track the movement of everyday Americans as well as the rich and famous, including President Trump, Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely.
The NYT had people poring over the calls and used that to check on the movements of the cell owners.
They said they had no problem tracking the movement of some of the subjects who were mentioned in the data the NYT received.
They are now warning cell phone users that they have no privacy.
They have laid out how easy it was to get access and to track users.
Using the data — which the Times notes can be legally obtained by companies, who defend collecting the data because it is “anonymous” and app users give their “consent” to being tracked — the Times says they spent most of their attention “identifying people in positions of power”:
With the help of publicly available information, like home addresses, we easily identified and then tracked scores of notables.
We followed military officials with security clearances as they drove home at night.
We tracked law enforcement officers as they took their kids to school. We watched high-powered lawyers (and their guests) as they traveled from private jets to vacation properties.
We did not name any of the people we identified without their permission.
The data set is large enough that it surely points to scandal and crime but our purpose wasn’t to dig up dirt. We wanted to document the risk of underregulated surveillance.
Watching dots move across a map sometimes revealed hints of faltering marriages, evidence of drug addiction, records of visits to psychological facilities.
