Smartphone apps are tracking people — and they know your name
Even though they’re supposed to be private and your data anonymous, smartphones are busy tracking their owners — and sharing the information, with names and other data connected.
The New York Times reports that they were able to obtain “precise locations of more than 12 million individual smartphones” that included celebrities and Pentagon officials, as well as average Americans.
Not only that, the phones revealed where their owners had been, from casinos to strip clubs to abortion clinics to drug treatment centers. And, during the January 6, 2021, rally and riots in Washington, they showed “about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol” when it was being stormed.
Although that data had no names or phone numbers, the Times was still able to connect the devices to unique IDs connected to the phones, including names, ethnicity, birthdays, home addresses and phone numbers. All of this is made possible, the Times says, through mobile advertising identifiers.