Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
Mass surveillance thanks to capitalism and advertising.
Highlights
id811132250
Clicking an option called “clustered” shows the device’s most frequently visited locations, which often pinpoints a residential address or place of work.
id811132209
Another lookup that Atlas performed focused on a parking lot in New Jersey reserved for jurors. The Locate X data is so granular that it is able to pinpoint devices that were inside that parking lot. From that, Atlas was able to track a potential jury member from a residence to the parking lot, through the court, to a diner likely to get lunch, back to the courtroom, a bagel place, and then back to the residence. Meaning, this tool could potentially be used to unmask the identities of jurors in trials too.
id811132042
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.
id811130169
a variety of investigative use cases. In February 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were using purchased location data for immigration and border enforcement. A month later, tech publication Protocol first revealed the existence of Babel Street’s Locate X, and reported that the Secret Service, ICE, and CBP also use the technology. When I was at Motherboard, I reported how the U.S. military was paying for Locate X, as well as tapping into a data supply chain that ultimately sourced some of the location information from a Muslim prayer app. I also found that a military unit that conducts drone strikes bought the tool, as did the Florida state prison system.
id811124560
This sort of surveillance is only possible because of the mobile advertising ecosystem. Location data is sometimes used to build profiles on device users and better target advertisements to them. Much of that advertising relies on a MAID, the unique advertising ID, on a phone. The MAID acts as the digital glue between a device and its associated data. But that same underlying system, of Google and Apple linking a unique identifier on the phone to a user’s activity, allows Babel Street and others to build their mass monitoring products. In many cases, a device’s MAID is also displayed inside Babel Street.
id811123131
“Whether location data is being used to identify and expose closeted gay Americans, or to track people as they cross state lines to seek reproductive health care, data brokers are selling Americans’ deepest secrets and exposing them to serious harm, all for a few bucks.