Leaked dataset from a location data company reveals a log of the movements of 12M+ Americans with 50B location pings across major cities between 2016 and 2017
EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized …
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
This leak is the concrete proof behind what the NYT's earlier reporting only described in aggregate: a year prior, the paper showed how smartphone apps share precise location data with 75+ companies up to thousands of times a day. The 2019 dataset turns that supply chain into an evidentiary record — 50 billion pings tying named individuals to home, work, and worship.
Anyone inside the 12M-person file is de-anonymizable: NYT reporters proved the 'anonymous' pings resolve to named individuals, addresses, and daily routines — including government personnel whose exposure is a security problem, not just a privacy one.
The location brokers that sold this data now have their product demonstrated as a re-identification tool in the country's paper of record, putting every downstream buyer on notice.
Second-order effects
Government customers become the vulnerability: once agencies are shown buying warrant-free access to the same commercial feeds, the data marketplaces' defense of anonymity collapses, and their enterprise sales face procurement and oversight review.
App publishers feeding these intermediaries — the 75+ company chain documented a year earlier — inherit the reputational and legal exposure of what aggregators do downstream.
Third-order effects
If commercial purchase keeps substituting for warrants, the pressure point shifts from individual apps to the broker layer itself, setting up the case for federal location-data regulation that the $12B industry has so far operated without.
De-identification stops functioning as a compliance shield: once one newsroom can name agents and track movements, the entire anonymized-data marketplace — not just location — loses its core legal and public argument.
The trend: The location-data economy is crossing from an unregulated collection story into a national-security and de-anonymization story that forces regulators to treat brokered 'anonymous' data as identifiable.
When we first started working with the data, we wanted to see if any sensitive sites were included. I zoomed into the Pentagon and saw this. Our jaws hit the floor. Full piece: http://nytimes.com/tracked pic.twitter.com/0GB3KnhQcR
@stuartathompson
Stuart A. Thompson on x
Months ago, someone contacted us with an astounding dataset. It tracked the precise movements of more than 12 million Americans in several major cities including Washington, New York and San Francisco. Today we published our findings: https://www.nytimes.com/...
@joannastern
Joanna Stern on x
To me, this great reporting has one only hope: to help convince lawmakers that we need more rules and protections. I point to this quote from Jaron Lainer in my smartphone of the decade essay: https://www.wsj.com/... pic.twitter.com/s0ywuK8YdQ
@cwarzel
Charlie Warzel on x
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. https://www.nytimes.com…
@hshaban
Hamza Shaban on x
wondering if this insane story, like Motherboard's story before it, about bounty hunters buying up phone location data, will, like, actually lead the FCC to do anything meaningful about it https://twitter.com/...
@tomgara
Tom Gara on x
The reporting here is fantastic, I finished it and immediately went to the location settings on my iPhone and turned them off for every app except Google Maps (I have made the tactical choice for Google to be my primary data panopticon) https://www.nytimes.com/...
@joannastern
Joanna Stern on x
How many people will say: “I don't care if some company knows that I go to work”? Or that “I went food to Whole Foods last night”?
@joannastern
Joanna Stern on x
My biggest worry after reading this great piece by @cwarzel and @stuartathompson? That people simply don't care enough to understand the larger implications of this sort of tracking. https://www.nytimes.com/...
@jscarto
Joshua Stevens on x
Reminds me of that time, in 2011, @kirkgoldsberry found locational breadcrumbs in iPhone backup files: https://phys.org/... This sort of tracking is troubling. That it happens on such a wide scale, and has been happening for so long, is astounding. https://twitter.com/...
@leakissner
Lea Kissner on x
The companies you should worry most about with regards to your privacy probably aren't the ones you're thinking of. They're the ones who siphon data off the sides where you don't see it and can't control it: trackers, ISPs, data brokers. 🧵🧵🧵 https://twitter.com/...
@kashhill
Kashmir Hill on x
@nytimes @PrivacyProject He works in the tech industry which increasingly determines what our privacy looks like. He works on drones that will be doing massive data collection as they zip around. And he's like, “meh,” about ability to track his every move & perceive that he's int…
@tomwarren
Tom Warren on x
interesting look at smartphone tracking data from The NY Times 👏It really is alarming how much data we generate every second, and just how well it's tracked by lots of companies https://twitter.com/...
@bwjones
Bryan William Jones on x
An excellent article that demonstrates how important privacy can be, and reveals just how much information can be gleaned from tracking phone records, establishing your identity and documenting your life. There is real danger here with info that is already being exploited... http…
@laurengoode
Lauren Goode on x
What stands out is not the fact that our smartphones and smartphone apps are collecting our location data - that we knew - but that protections around anonymity crumble once data sets are cross-referenced or combined https://twitter.com/...
@benedictevans
Benedict Evans on x
Among other things, stories like this are an argument for platform owners exerting (even) more control over what developers and publishers are allowed to do, and doing more aggressive curation of the app stores https://twitter.com/...
@johnbattelle
John Battelle on x
Apple/Google et al claim to be privacy driven companies, yet take no resp. for the externalities of their core platform. This report is chilling, but in no way a surprise. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@cwarzel
Charlie Warzel on x
@nytopinion Here is what was in the data: More than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans, across several major cities. @stuartathompson and I then spent months reporting on how we are all tracked through apps on our phones. https://www.nytim…
@kashhill
Kashmir Hill on x
@nytimes @PrivacyProject Of course, a former Microsoft engineer who now works at Amazon, whose interview w/ a competitor was detectable in the location data, isn't that worried about widespread stalking of people's movements through phones. https://twitter.com/...
@stuartathompson
Stuart A. Thompson on x
The data included more than 50 billion rows of data. That's 50 billion places people have been. Shops, workplaces, homes, hotels. All laid out in intricate detail, tied to an ID that let us follow individual paths.
@robertcaruso
Robert Caruso on x
“This data reveals your kid's exact route to school and where you spent the night, or potentially even whom you spent the night with.” Correct! https://twitter.com/...
@pashulman
Peter A. Shulman on x
WOW. “We followed military officials with security clearances as they drove home at night. We tracked law enforcement officers as they took their kids to school. We watched high-powered lawyers (and their guests) as they traveled from private jets to vacation properties.” https:/…
@carnage4life
Dare Obasanjo on x
Yesterday I saw a US lawmaker claiming that figuring out location from your IP address is a nefarious privacy violation if a big tech company does it. In reality, no name companies are buying & selling your real-time location data from apps & carriers. https://www.nytimes.com/...
@drjjoyner
James Joyner on x
“[C]itizens would surely rise up in outrage if the government attempted to mandate that every person above the age of 12 carry a tracking device that revealed their location 24 hours a day. Yet ... Americans have ... consented to just such a system run by private companies.” http…
@justinwolfers
Justin Wolfers on x
It's not often you read a piece of journalism (indeed, data journalism!) that you know will turn an industry on its head and spark a new legislative agenda, but this is one of those it'll-change-the-world pieces. https://twitter.com/...
@wolfiechristl
Wolfie Christl on x
“Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies ...are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones” The NYT obtained a file containing 50 billion location records from 12 million phones. Massive piece: https://www.nytimes.com/.…
@mirakamdar
Mira Kamdar on x
This article is a must-read. There's a handy link to reduce how trackable you are on your phone. I just did. https://twitter.com/...
@zittrain
Jonathan Zittrain on x
A data leak powers a great piece by @stuartathompson and @cwarzel on the personal location data free-for-all. Another reason for brokers to be information fiduciaries. Meanwhile, self-styled privacy champion Apple could tweak iOS to default to city-level location sharing only. ht…
@kashhill
Kashmir Hill on x
Last December, @nytimes did an amazing story on how your location gets tracked by phone apps & sold: https://www.nytimes.com/.... Now, @PrivacyProject revisits the topic, w/a huge dataset of those locations & interviews with the people tracked: https://www.nytimes.com/...