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
The Capitol dataset follows earlier reporting that attendance at a political rally could be inferred from commercial location data and that a leaked dataset exposed a Secret Service agent's home and family details. It makes the privacy boundary around advertising identifiers concrete: identifiers presented as device-level data can be connected to named people and their movements.
First-order effects
People whose devices appear in the leaked Capitol data face identification and movement tracing by analysts able to connect advertising IDs with other information; Times Opinion demonstrates that linkage in practice.
If advertising IDs remain linkable to real-world identities, the distinction between advertising telemetry and person-level surveillance weakens, expanding the public-data permission boundary for political activity and sensitive locations.
The trend: Commercial smartphone location data is becoming a practical identity-and-movement tracking layer rather than a merely aggregated advertising signal.
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/...
Using a trove of leaked smartphone location data, @cwarzel and @stuartathompson identified some of the Capitol rioters. In this time-lapse animation, smartphones moved from Trump's rally to the Capitol. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
About 40% of the phones tracked near the stage of President Trump's Jan. 6 rally were also found in and around the Capitol during the siege that followed. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“After this, we're going to walk down and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down. We're going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We're going walk down to the Capitol...” https://twitter.com/...
This is so damning... Just imagine if this was showing a relation to video games, heavy metal or rap, and then some form of violence. Then maybe the GOP would care. https://twitter.com/...
I feel like these data sets are just as concerning as the Snowden revelations but have received far less attention. Someone convince me otherwise. Marketers can literally track your every move. https://twitter.com/...
What does “around” mean? How close is “around”? Because a solid chunk of non-insurrectionist territory is “around” the Capitol depending on how we define that https://twitter.com/...
« They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them. » Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data. https://twitter.com/...