Prominent investors in location start-ups include Goldman Sachs and Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder.īusinesses say their interest is in the patterns, not the identities, that the data reveals about consumers. The social network Foursquare remade itself as a location marketing company. IBM has gotten into the industry, with its purchase of the Weather Channel’s apps. It’s a hot market, with sales of location-targeted advertising reaching an estimated $21 billion this year. These companies sell, use or analyze the data to cater to advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds seeking insights into consumer behavior.
The database reviewed by The Times - a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company - reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States - about half those in use last year. Keller and Richard Harris | Satellite imagery by Mapbox and DigitalGlobeĪt least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found.
But as smartphones have become ubiquitous and technology more accurate, an industry of snooping on people’s daily habits has spread and grown more intrusive.īy Michael H. Magrin knew that apps could track people’s movements. Magrin, who allowed The Times to review her location data. “It’s the thought of people finding out those intimate details that you don’t want people to know,” said Ms. It followed her hiking with her dog and staying at her ex-boyfriend’s home, information she found disturbing. The app tracked her as she went to a Weight Watchers meeting and to her dermatologist’s office for a minor procedure. Magrin’s identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily connect her to that dot. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. Her smartphone goes with her.Īn app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor of New York during the day and returns to Long Island at night. One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails - each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user.
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