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 , @suchitrav , @snowden , @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/... 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/... 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/... @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
The New York Times' warning that routine apps can tie a phone's owner to a political rally lands at the start of an arc the related coverage traces over three years: the same realtime location streams powering ad targeting turned out to be reusable for almost anything. Within months, Unacast was grading Americans' pandemic behavior region-by-region from app location data, showing how quickly commercial mobility datasets get repurposed once they exist.
The follow-on coverage maps both the scale of the trade and its fault lines — The Markup sized it as a $12B industry of collectors, aggregators, and marketplaces — while SafeGraph's later retreat from selling Planned Parenthood visitor data showed vendors selectively withdrawing where misuse became politically untenable. The rally story matters because it identifies the mechanism before the misuse cases arrived: presence itself becomes a record.
First-order effects
- Anyone attending a political rally is affected immediately: their phone's pings to nearby towers and always-on app SDKs place them in commercial datasets that can be queried for attendance, regardless of whether they opened any app at the event.
- App developers embedding third-party tracking SDKs are the direct supply side — their users' movements are being monetized through chains of collectors and aggregators the developers themselves may not fully see.
Second-order effects
- Data brokers face pressure to segment their catalogs by sensitivity: SafeGraph's carve-out for family-planning clinics sets a template where vendors quietly drop the categories that generate scandal while continuing to sell the rest.
- Protest organizers and adjacent platforms get pulled into the surveillance question — Facebook's separate removal of anti-lockdown protest events shows platforms already arbitrating which gatherings exist digitally, complementing the dataset trail that follows them physically.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, attendance at politically or medically sensitive places becomes a de facto public record maintained by private companies, forcing either regulation of the collector-aggregator-marketplace pipeline or a market norm where 'sensitive venue' exclusions become a selling point.
- The deeper shift is that location data stops being an advertising byproduct and becomes a liability category of its own — with carriers, app makers, and brokers each holding a slice of the same person's movement history that no single player fully controls.
The trend: Commercial location data is evolving from an invisible ad-targeting input into a politically charged commodity whose sellers retreat category-by-category as each new misuse surfaces.