Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics

Joseph Cox writing for 404 Media (Apple News):

The data ultimately powering tools like Babel Street’s Locate X can come from two main sources. The first are ordinary apps installed on peoples’ phones, whose developers sell their users’ location data to a broker, who then in turn sells it either directly or through a series of middlemen to a company like Babel Street. The other is through a process called real-time bidding, in which members of the online ad industry try to outbid one another to have their advert be delivered to a certain demographic of users. A side effect is that some companies listen in on that process, and harvest location data on unsuspecting swaths of the public. 

This should be illegal. If I decide to give location access to an app, that doesn’t mean I’m consenting to being tracked where ever I go. It just means I want to know the whether where I’m at, or what the traffic is like.

The online advertising industry needs to be burnt to the ground.