Your phone knows where it is, and thus most of the time, where you are. And your phone tells your phone company all of the time. Mobile phone companies know where your cell phone is all the time it is turned on. They have to, because they monitor which cell towers it uses. And they keep records of your phone's geographic location (geoloc). Who else knows?
The history of your phone locations is considered sensitive privacy data, and in many jurisdictions a law enforcement or intelligence activity must have a warrant or court order to obtain those records from the phone company. That sounds nice, but do not for a moment think your location privacy is protected from government surveillance by these legal requirements. Your geoloc history is on the market for purchase, and governments are buying.
Every smart phone is delivered with a batch of apps already installed, and almost every new owner adds more games and productivity apps in short order. They also very rarely read and understand the permissions they grant to those apps when they click the ACCEPT button to install each app. And a surprising number of apps ask for permission to know your location. Why in the world would a flashlight app or a picture-mapping app need to know where it is being used? Because those app companies build their own geoloc files for your phone, independent of the phone company's records. Then they sell that data to data brokers. And the data brokers aggregate that data from multiple app vendors to esll to other customers. Who buys from these data brokers? We can assume companies that want to do marketing analysis are primary buyers. However, another buyer category has come to light: government agencies.
See the Jan 22, 2021, Verge article US Defense Intelligence Agency admits to buying citizens’ location data. The title tells the core story: while the US Supreme Court Carpenter ruling said the government must have a warrant to obtain geoloc data from phone companies, both the DIA and law enforcement agencies assert that ruling does not restrict them from buying geoloc data from commercial data brokers, without any judicial approval in advance. You can read for yourself what the DIA said in their memo to Senator Wyden explaining their testimony in a recent Senate committee hearing. Basically, DIA says it is OK for them to have this data, and as long as they are not looking at it, they have not "collected location data on US persons.
Hmmm, that sounds a lot like the testimony years ago by a NSA Director that they had not "collected" the cell phone data being stored in their massive Utah data enter, because they had not looked at that data.
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“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
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(c) 2021 D. Cragin Shelton
The above article originally appeared in my Randomness Blog.
