New York Times was able to track President Trump’s movements by combining leaked location data…

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

➖Times Privacy Project got the data from anonymous whistleblowers concerned about this vulnerability and a lack of regulations ❗️Dataset of >50 billion location pings from the phones of >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 to deanonymize location data and track the whereabouts of President
➖NYT said result being tracking and identifying people as easy. And there is no regulation to stop the exchange of sych data between different parties and companies for profit❗️
➖“Tech companies are profiting by spying on Americans.. report is another alarming case for why we need to break up big tech, adopt serious privacy regulations and hold top executives of these companies personally responsible.” Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat running for president, told NYT
➖“Location tracking data of individuals can be used to facilitate reconnaissance, recruitment, social engineering, extortion and in worst-case scenarios, things like kidnapping and assassination,” warned a cybersecurity expert

💡The sources who provided the trove of location information to Times Opinion did so to press for regulation and increased scrutiny of the location data market. So far, Washington has done virtually nothing to address the threats, and location data companies have every reason to keep refining their tracking, sucking up more data and selling it to the highest bidders.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/location-data-national-security.html