Leaked cellphone data from the siege at the Capitol demonstrates how advertising IDs can be used to identify and track the movement of specific individuals
Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data. — Mr. Warzel and Mr. Thompson are writers in Opinion.
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second time Times Opinion has turned a commercial location dataset into named individuals: in late 2019 the same newsroom identified a Secret Service agent, his home address, and family details from leaked smartphone data, and showed that merely carrying a phone to a political rally could tie its owner to the event in commercial datasets. The new piece applies that same de-anonymization method to the Capitol siege, demonstrating that advertising IDs — not government surveillance tools — were enough to track specific people's movements.
The demonstration lands alongside two other disclosures about this data ecosystem: an unclassified memo showing DIA analysts have bought commercial app-location databases to track Americans without warrants, and a review of charging documents finding Facebook referenced in 73 of 200+ Capitol cases. Together they frame ad-tech location data as a surveillance layer available to journalists, agencies, and prosecutors alike.
First-order effects
Individuals present at the siege are now identifiable by anyone who obtains similar commercial datasets — the Times' method shows protest attendance is no longer anonymous against advertising-ID trails.
Second-order effects
Law-enforcement and intelligence buyers of commercial location data face heightened scrutiny: the DIA's warrantless use of the same kind of databases now sits next to a public proof-of-concept showing how invasive those purchases are.
Third-order effects
If journalists can repeatedly de-anonymize people from advertising IDs, the case hardens for treating commercial location data as within the public-data permission boundary — pushing toward regulation of data brokers and platform ID practices rather than case-by-case scandal.
The trend: Commercially collected smartphone location data is maturing from an ad-targeting asset into a de facto surveillance infrastructure usable by anyone who can buy it.
New: @stuartathompson and i received a trove of smartphone location data from 1/6. The set included about 100,000 location pings, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol at the time of the siege. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
In Opinion Using a trove of leaked smartphone location data, @cwarzel and @stuartathompson identified some of the Capitol rioters. The data “is a bird's-eye view of an event that posed a clear and grave threat to our democracy,” they write. https://www.nytimes.com/...
This is the data the marketing industry collects and tells consumers is “anonymized.” Not anonymized enough that the NYT couldn't pluck a man named Ronnie Vincent and 2,000 others out of it and match their “anonymized” cell phone movements to their real-world identities. https://…
Watch the video at this link. It's stunning. The NYT shows how all the phones at Trump's rally went right to the Capitol. His defense that his speech had nothing to do with the breach was always laughable—but @RepRaskin and @TedLieu should use this visual. https://www.nytimes.com…
“About 40 percent of the phones tracked near the rally stage on the National Mall during the speeches were also found in and around the Capitol during the siege — a clear link between those who'd listened to the president and his allies and then marched on the building.” https://…
Others have pointed this out, but it's pretty ridiculous for these people to worry about government control and microchips when they're carrying around personal GPS devices tracking all their personal info. And advertising it. https://twitter.com/...
The video in the link should be EXHIBIT A next week- you can literally see the cell phones move from trump's rally to the Capitol. https://twitter.com/...