If you still aren’t convinced Big Brother can see you, here’s where Trump has gone – It’s often about who accompanies you or what 3rd party apps you may be using

If you own a mobile phone, its every move is logged and tracked by dozens of companies. No one is beyond the reach of this constant digital surveillance. Not even the president of the United States.

The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country. It was a random sample from 2016 and 2017, but it took only minutes — with assistance from publicly available information — for us to deanonymize location data and track the whereabouts of President Trump.

"The vulnerability of the person we tracked in Mr. Trump’s entourage is one that many if not all of us share: the apps (weather services, maps, perhaps even something as mundane as a coupon saver) collecting and sharing his location on his phone."

It’s not so much that we are tracked and the information is recorded, it’s about who gets access to it and what they can infer from lots of data from different sources when put together. For those who don’t like this idea you will have no choice but to move off mainstream phones and buy phones with physical kill switches. Will convenience though trump privacy for most users?

See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/location-data-national-security.html

#technology #privacy
#^Opinion | How to Track President Trump

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Smartphones leave a trail that anyone — and any foreign government — could follow.