Here’s a story that’s almost certainly going to see government-level changes to the way things work today. 

• The New York Times received a data leak from someone working at what it calls a “location data company”. Not a giant telco or the likes of Apple or Google, but “one of dozens” of similar companies few people have ever heard of.
• The data: 50 billion location points for 12 million smartphones in the US, collected over “several months in 2016 and 2017.”
• It’s serious because it shows smartphone location data, and it doesn’t come with names, photos, or email addresses because it’s “anonymized.”
• But the Times says “it’s child’s play to connect real names to the dots that appear on the maps.”
• And they prove it, tracking down a Microsoft worker in Seattle who went to Amazon one day, out of the blue, then a month later, started going to Amazon every day. It’s the story of Ben Broili, someone it took “minutes” to identify, and pinpoint, and speak to, for the article.
• The Times tracked private people attending the Playboy Mansion, Mar-A-Lago, stock exchanges, the White House, and the supposedly secure Pentagon.
• In short, it’s way, way worse than you think, and points to systematic failures.
• I don’t think many would believe there’s a problem if you want to give the likes of GasBuddy, for example, your location to more easily find cheap gas near you. 
• But it’s the sale of your data within miliseconds, the continued tracking long after you’ve already found your gas, and wider collection and storage that can be used to see where you drove, where you parked, how long you stayed, and where you went next that is vastly overreaching.
• “Creepy” is one take, but I find it more horrifying. The government, for example, can't get this much data on your without a warrant. A company just needs a million bucks.

Some snips from authors Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel:

• “The data can change hands in almost real time, so fast that your location could be transferred from your smartphone to the app’s servers and exported to third parties in milliseconds”
• “This is how, for example, you might see an ad for a new car some time after walking through a dealership.”
• “That data can then be resold, copied, pirated and abused. There’s no way you can ever retrieve it.”
• “Is all of this surveillance and risk worth it merely so that we can be served slightly more relevant ads? Or so that hedge fund managers can get richer?”

You can do something:

• Freaked Out? 3 Steps to Protect Your Phone on iOS or Android, a part 2 of sorts.
• I’ve now ‘Opted out of Ads Personalization’, the second step in this list.