Your Digital Exhaust **IS** Being Hoovered Up
What is your digital exhaust? It is all the clues you leave behind as you navigate your digital journey. Whether it is location data that you give to a game or a cell phone tower that you ping off of. Or that box you checked without reading when you installed that app. They all are being collected and then sold. Multiple times. Many times that data will tell buyers where you live (where your phone lives at 2 AM), if you are having an affair (why is your phone at a hotel and not moving for hours), who that affair is with (what other phone is at the same locations that you are), where your kids go to school and many, many other things. It that isn’t unpleasant to you, it should be.
You can pay a data privacy firm to **HELP** you get that data removed, but it is a cat and mouse game. One player in the removal business is Atlas Data Privacy Corp. They are funded by millions in lawsuit proceeds.
So far this year, Atlas has sued 151 consumer data brokers on behalf of a class. It is an interesting class. New Jersey has a law, called Daniel’s Law, after Daniel Anderl, that allows New Jersey law enforcement, government employees, judges and their families to have their information completely removed. As a reminder, I wrote about this once before. The insiders are taking care of themselves, but not taking care of you.
A variant of this is what Babel Street does. Draw a shape on a map and they will tell customers every mobile device that has been seen coming in and out of that box. Think abortion clinic, as an example.
Babel Street’s flagship LocateX platform also allows customers to track INDIVIDUAL PHONES by their MOBILE ADVERTISING ID. They do this from all of the ads that are served up to you by advertising networks.
Right now Atlas is being sued because the software allowed a PI to determine the home address and track the movements of New Jersey police officers and their families, in violation of Daniel’s law.
They claim they only sell to the government or government contractors, but the truth is, apparently, that they only sell to people whose credit cards clear. I don’t know, maybe they take wires too.
This is just one of the tools on the market. Texas is spending $5 million on a surveillance tool called Tangles.
Law enforcement agencies in North Caroline and California are using a tool called Fog Reveal.
All of this with a credit card instead of a warrant. For the most part, all legal and even if it is not legal, what are the odds of getting caught and if caught, what are the odds of getting prosecuted?
At least on an android phone, you can change your advertising ID and you can turn off some tracking features (likely also on iPhones, but I don’t use them), but the process is all manual and most people don’t have a clue about how to do that. They are all on by default.
Don’t forget about data enrichment. We know of a company that has acquired a license to a dataset of about 200 million Americans with about 2,500 different “enriched” data points for each one of them. So much for not being able to match your advertising ID to your real world ID. They are basically good guys and just use it for targeted advertising, which is certainly less evil than using it to send threatening text messages saying that someone is going to put a bullet in your family member’s head.
Researchers used this technique to link visits from SEC investigators to people suspected of insider trading before they were charged or the investigation became public.
You get the general idea. In the US, it is all about the money and, except for a few small groups like those protected by Daniel’s law, it is a free market.
How do you feel about that?
Credit: Brian Krebs
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