That was just to find the people who might agree with them. When it come time to track down the people that they don’t like, that’s when the geo-fencing will get really intense.
Mosques.
Gay Bars.
Non-English speaking locations.
Libraries.
Suspicious bookstores.
Any kind of alternative lifestyle location.
Clubs or concerts for music they don’t like.
etc…
Heck, build an “antidex” of enemies, buy the locations in real time and plot it in a Pokemon Go-type app for their goons to play with. Gotta catch them all!
I’m sure someone makes a lightweight lead lined pouch to keep cell phones in by now. Because if you don’t mind slightly more weight you could technically carry the phone around without anything pinging it that way
It sounds like a great idea for transporting the phone… but if you need to use it, you have to take it out of the bag, and then you’re back “on the grid.”
Any mobile app you have on your phone that is set to “allow location tracking” = always can get you location data. It can then sell that data to anyone and everyone.
If you have ever gotten an alert because you were near a store whose mobile app you have, this is how that works. Track the data, put in a list of lat-lons for were the stores are, pop an alert when your phone is close. Or sell the data.
This is the reason I don’t allow most apps to know my location. Other than weather which needs it and maps which needs it. And those I have set to “only when using the app”.
Here’s an article from last year about US & Canadian cell carriers selling location data to third party companies.
From the article:
Kevin Bankston, director of New America’s Open Technology Institute, explained in a phone call that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act only restricts telecom companies from disclosing data to the government. It doesn’t restrict disclosure to other companies, who then may disclose that same data to the government.
He called that loophole “one of the biggest gaps in US privacy law.”
“The issue doesn’t appear to have been directly litigated before, but because of the way that the law only restricts disclosures by these types of companies to government, my fear is that they would argue that they can do a pass-through arrangement like this,” he said.
LocationSmart, a California-based technology company, is one of a handful of so-called data aggregators. It claimed to have “direct connections” to cell carrier networks to obtain real-time cell phone location data from nearby cell towers. It’s less accurate than using GPS, but cell tower data won’t drain a phone battery and doesn’t require a user to install an app. Verizon, one of many cell carriers that sells access to its vast amounts of customer location data, counts LocationSmart as a close partner.
So yeah, it looks like right now it is legal to sell data of where someone has been. However, the article mentions that the law does consent is required from owners, and it’s unknown if they actually got consent. They could be using a limited subset of people who gave consent or they could just be ignoring that and telecoms could be selling everyone’s location. Since no one is auditing the data, I don’t know how it’s known if someone consented or not.
Not to mention that even if they did consent for data tracking, it’s unknown if people were specifically agreeing to that, or if it was something small snuck into a very long user agreement.
Besides targeted messaging, another use for this kind of information is targeted voter suppression.
In the 2011 Canadian election, the Conservatives targeted a number of close ridings with misleading robocalls claiming to be from Elections Canada, telling voters that their polling location had been changed. They had a big database of all their supporters, so they could avoid robocalling them. In the end, there was a show trial where this Canada-wide operation was all blamed on a low-level staffer in one riding, who was on vacation when this was supposed to be happening. He went to jail, but I presume he was well rewarded for taking the fall.
