Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics
Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics
Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the world. Abortion clinics, places of worship, and individual people can all be monitored without a warrant.
Privacy advocates got access to Locate X, a phone tracking tool which multiple U.S. agencies have bought access to, and showed me and other journalists exactly what it was capable of. Tracking a phone from one state to another to an abortion clinic. Multiple places of worship. A school. Following a likely juror to a residence. And all of this tracking is possible without a warrant, and instead just a few clicks of a mouse.
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Apple and Google can fix the problem. Apps are required to ask for permission to access location information. Most of the time, it's for tracking and analytics, not anything related to the app's functionality. That's the data that is leaking to these data brokers.
In those cases, if asked, user can say no, but apps keep haranguing you until you capitulate.
Instead, the OS could add a button that says: "Yes, but randomize." After that, location data is returned as normal, but from totally random locations nearby. They could even spoof the data clustering algorithms and just pick some rando location and keep showing returns to them, or just trade the data from one random phone for another every N days.
You do this enough and the data will become polluted enough to become useless.
Apple and Google want to sell that data, they're not going to help you obscure it.