The sale of location data sales has become both big business, and one of the biggest privacy threats in recent years. While the companies involved in this $14B industry claim that only aggregated and anonymized data is sold, numerous investigations have shown that this simply isn’t true.
Just yesterday, we learned that the Federal Trade Commission is suing a data broker that can identify people seeking abortions, and that it made samples of that data publicly available. In the past, we’ve seen how location data can reveal everything from where cops’ kids go to school to US troop movements in war zones …
more…