Simply carrying a smartphone to a political rally could tie its owner to the event in commercial datasets, thanks to the realtime tracking tech in mundane apps
New York Times : Tweets: @carnage4life , @snowden , @suchitrav , @paulkidd , @campuscodi , @nytopinion , @dirktherabbit , @michellerobbins , @cwarzel , @cwarzel , @chadloder , @bora_dimpy , and @mandystadt Tweets: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : By definition, the way cell phones work (i.e. pinging nearby cell towers, etc) means that you don't need apps or GPS turned to give away your location. Your carrier knows your location and can give it to the authorities or (in the US) sell it to others. https://www.nytimes.com/... Edward Snowden / @snowden : Even at protests, your phone is emitting a beacon, one that's invisible to the human eye. This signal is captured and collected, sometimes many times per minute, and keeps broadcasting long after the protesters head to their homes and take off their masks. https://www.nytimes.com/... Suchitra Vijayan / @suchitrav : “Even at protests, your phone is emitting a beacon... This signal is captured and collected, sometimes many times per minute, and keeps broadcasting long after the protesters head to their homes and take off their masks.-” h/t @Snowden https://www.nytimes.com/... @paulkidd : If you take your smartphone to a political rally or protest, you will be tracked and your participation will be recorded in a commercial dataset. Chilling. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Catalin Cimpanu / @campuscodi : I've seen the “Leave your smartphone at home” advice on many protest leaflets, forum posts, and Facebook groups for a few years now. Glad there's now solid and believable repoting to support this advice. https://twitter.com/... @nytopinion : Protesters in Hong Kong hold their phones to the sky. But the signal keeps broadcasting, long after they turn off their camera lights, head to their homes and take off their masks. http://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Dirk Singer / @dirktherabbit : “Within minutes, with no special training and a little bit of Google searching, Times Opinion was able to single out and identify individuals at public demonstrations large and small from coast to coast.” Latest of an interesting series from the NYT on how our phones track us https://twitter.com/... @michellerobbins : See also: why I brought a burner phone with me to the Womens March in DC 👇 https://twitter.com/... Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel : The final piece of reporting is about protests/democracy. It was easy to single out and identify individuals at public protests large and small from coast to coast. The Women's March, Inauguration protests, a Berkeley alt-right/antifa clash, and more. https://www.nytimes.com/... Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel : The last two pieces in our location tracking series are out today. The first shows how easy it was for us to track political protesters and the danger surveillance like this might pose to democracy if we don't develop some rules around collection. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Chad Loder / @chadloder : Police in the US routinely track mobile phones at protests. https://twitter.com/... Dimpy Bora / @bora_dimpy : I stopped carrying my phone to protest rallies during the internet shutdown. This article makes for a very valid reason not to carry any signal emitting object on oneself. Another reason is that during protest rallies without internet, ppl were far more attentive to speeches. https://twitter.com/... Mandy Stadtmiller / @mandystadt : Andrew Yang is the only candidate speaking to our data rights. Data is 2019 oil. It's worth billions of dollars in profits that you and I never see as we struggle to just get by. Data is our right. And we gotta fight. For our right. To DAYYYYY-TA (all due respect fuhrealtho) https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 New York Times report is the opening move in an arc that kept escalating: it showed that ordinary apps' realtime location tech could tie a phone — and its owner — to a political rally in commercial datasets, with Snowden and others noting phones betray location even at protests without GPS or apps enabled. What followed shows the market only grew: analytics firms later built products directly on this firehose, including Unacast's Social Distancing Scoreboard grading US regions during the pandemic, and a 2021 investigation sized the whole trade as a $12B location data industry of collectors, aggregators, and marketplaces.
First-order effects
- Anyone who carried a phone to a rally became linkable to that event in datasets sold through the collector-aggregator-marketplace chain described in the industry reporting — attendance becomes a purchasable fact about a named person.
- App users are affected immediately and unknowingly: the tracking runs through mundane apps, so consent to one app's terms functions as consent to political profiling they never contemplated.
Second-order effects
- Buyers of the data gain a cheap alternative to physical surveillance of political gatherings, while platforms face parallel pressure on protest activity itself — as when Facebook removed events protesting stay-at-home orders for defying government guidance.
- Brokers come under reputational and commercial pressure to police sensitive categories themselves, a retreat [[a:978559|SafeGraph made explicit in 2022 by halting sales of Planned Parenthood visitor location data]] 'to curtail any potential misuse' — an admission that misuse was plausible enough to warrant pulling a product line.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, commercial location data hardens into de facto surveillance infrastructure where political exposure is governed not by law but by each broker's voluntary category-by-category withdrawals — leaving the same dataset legal to sell for one venue and withdrawn for another.
- That inconsistency is the strongest argument for regulation treating location near sensitive or political sites as a distinct class of data, since the industry's own SafeGraph-style retreats concede the harm while fixing none of the structure.
The trend: Commercial location tracking is maturing from an ad-tech byproduct into a politically charged surveillance surface, with data brokers retreating category-by-category under scrutiny rather than the trade being structurally reined in.