NYT tracked Trump using location information from a Secret Service agent's phone

The New York Times is running a fascinating series on how supposedly anonymous location data isn't actually anonymous, and you should definitely go read it.

It's a disturbing look at how far smartphone tracking has gone, and how it's really easy to identify someone just by looking at their daily commute. After all, how many other people travel to your office and then back to your home every day?

If you're thinking that no one has access to your home or office address, remember that there have already been multiple data breaches over the past decade with precisely this information.

To drive home that message, the Time even dedicated a piece to tracking none other than the President of the United States. They did so by tracing the movements of Donald Trump's Secret Service agents and other government officials, and it's a stunning look at how little privacy we really have if someone has access to the right data set.

New: Today's piece from @stuartathompson and me is about the national security risks in smartphone tracking. No one is exempt. Not even @realDonaldTrump. It took minutes to find a phone that we believe belonged to a Secret Service agent traveling w/ Trump. https://t.co/NaT0hAtYdO pic.twitter.com/Bq1BtzYw7K

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) 20 December 2019

It's worth pointing out that location tracking is a perfectly legal industry, centring around apps that monitor your location without your knowledge. The Times used information from a location data company, which is just one of many that collect information on your exact movements using software inserted into mobile apps.

This particular data set contained over 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans, tracking them as they went about their daily lives and travelled from city to city.

"The data can change hands in almost real-time, so fast that your location could be transferred from your smartphone to the app's servers and exported to third parties in milliseconds," write Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson. "This is how, for example, you might see an ad for a new car sometime after walking through a dealership.

You'd probably resist if a certain company wanted you to carry around a tracking device on your person in order to enjoy greater personalisation or more relevant ads. But that's exactly what we've consented to, unwittingly or not, when we take our smartphones around to us. Just look at a seemingly innocuous app like Google Maps, which can show you a creepy location history of where you've been if you didn't disable the feature.

According to the Times, the sources who provided them with this information did so to push for greater regulation and closer scrutiny of the location tracking industry. After seeing what they've uncovered, it's really not difficult to see why.

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.