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How commercially-available phone location data is used by ICE (and other law enforcement agencies) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/41421285

screenshot of text: The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.

via this 404 media article: https://www.404media.co/inside-ices-tool-to-monitor-phones-in-entire-neighborhoods/

paywall bypass: https://web.archive.org/web/20260108141914/https://www.404media.co/inside-ices-tool-to-monitor-phones-in-entire-neighborhoods/

screenshot of text: The material shows Webloc users can search its databases of mobile phone data in various ways. Users can perform a single perimeter analysis to search a specific area for mobile phones across a certain time period. They can draw the target area with a rectangle, circle, or polygon. They then select the maximum number of results the system should display, and the maximum number of devices to return. Once a Webloc user has identified a device of interest, they can get more details about that particular phone, and, by extension, its owner, by seeing where else it has travelled both locally and across the country. Users can click a route feature which shows the path the device took. The material suggests that if users look at where the device was located at night, they might find the person’s possible home, and during the day, the person’s possible employer. The software can also do a multi-permiter analysis, which monitors multiple locations at once to see which devices have been present at two or more specific places.
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[–] 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

So, in theory, someone with this data could find people who are currently in Minnesota, for a long stretch at a time, and who were never in Minnesota previously. And who might have coincidentally been to LA or Chicago or some other place. Wow.

I hope nobody does that and posts the results.

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