Today @stuartathompson and I pubbed the 1st in a series on location tracking. Based off more than 50 billion location pings we obtained covering 12 million phones. It's the culmination of months of reporting. We'll be publishing 7 stories in all this week. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
@stuartathompson Those who used to collect our every movement via our phones argue that people consent to be tracked, that the data is anonymous & secure. Our reporting proves otherwise. If you have access to this data it's easy to connect real names to the dots that appear on the maps. 
@stuartathompson We identified people at political rallies and protests, in one case from 2016 we saw a Seattle-based Microsoft employee take a day off and visit Amazon's campus...when we found him on LinkedIn in 2019 he was an Amazon employee. Turns out his phone had given away his job interview
@stuartathompson In recent months we’ve spoken with people we’ve found in the data. Their reaction is surprising — a blend of contradictory emotions like outrage and apathy. We don't have the language to talk about this stuff. And part of the reason is...we adopted this tech so fast.
@stuartathompson A big takeaway from my experience with this reporting: This is the decade we were brainwashed into surveilling ourselves. In just over 10 years we were sold a future of personalization and convenience and paid for it with little pieces of ourselves that we can never get back.
@stuartathompson The technology is here. And some location tracking (maps/directions) is genuinely helpful. But this investigation shows that many companies collecting it are middlemen, providing little value while collecting information that looks like this
@stuartathompson Our hope for this series two-fold: 1.) that people can get a better sense of what they're consenting to when they turn on location services. 2) that lawmakers step in to protect Americans’ needs as consumers and rights as citizens.
@stuartathompson We have to ask questions about the world we're building. Does a coupon app need to sell second-by-second location data to other companies to be profitable? Is all of this surveillance and risk worth it merely so that we can be served slightly more relevant ads?
@stuartathompson Lastly: all this reporting wouldn't be possible without the trailblazing work that my colleagues at the Times have done on location tracking, like this defining piece. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
@stuartathompson and also others like Motherboard and Gizmodo (and many others) have broken ground and we're indebted to that work. vice.com/en_us/article/… gizmodo.com/turning-off-fa…
