Considering Mass Surveillance

Cops Wanted to Keep Mass Surveillance App Secret; Privacy Advocates Refused

By Ars Technica, September 9, 2022  in CACM

Much is known about how the federal government leverages location data by serving warrants to major tech companies like Google or Facebook to investigate crime in America. However, much less is known about how location data influences state and local law enforcement investigations. It turns out that's because many local police agencies intentionally avoid mentioning the under-the-radar tech they use—sometimes without warrants—to monitor private citizens.

As one Maryland-based sergeant wrote in a department email, touting the benefit of "no court paperwork" before purchasing the software, "The success lies in the secrecy."

This week, an investigation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Associated Press—supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting—has made public what could be considered local police's best-kept secret. Their reporting revealed the potentially extreme extent of data surveillance of ordinary people being tracked and made vulnerable just for moving about small-town America....

It took the Electronic Frontier Foundation months and more than 100 public records requests to gather thousands of pages of evidence to compile a clear picture that shows how local law enforcement increasingly mines location data.... 

From Ars Technica  

The Value of Phone Location Data

 The Another example of how valuable personal data can be.

ACM NEWS

There's a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone's Location Data

By The Markup, September 30, 2021

Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone. An estimated $12 billion market, the location data industry has many players: collectors, aggregators, marketplaces, and location intelligence firms, all of which boast about the scale and precision of the data that they've amassed.

Location firm Near describes itself as "The World's Largest Dataset of People's Behavior in the Real-World," with data representing "1.6B people across 44 countries." Mobilewalla boasts "40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data." X-Mode's website claims its data covers "25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly."

In an effort to shed light on this little-monitored industry, The Markup has identified 47 companies that harvest, sell, or trade in mobile phone location data. While hardly comprehensive, the list begins to paint a picture of the interconnected players that do everything from providing code to app developers to monetize user data to offering analytics from "1.9 billion devices" and access to datasets on hundreds of millions of people. Six companies claimed more than a billion devices in their data, and at least four claimed their data was the "most accurate" in the industry.

Full article