Commercial Location Data Used to Out Priest
A Catholic priest was outed through commercially available surveillance data. Vice has a good analysis:
The news starkly demonstrates not only the inherent power of location data, but how the chance to wield that power has trickled down from corporations and intelligence agencies to essentially any sort of disgruntled, unscrupulous, or dangerous individual. A growing market of data brokers that collect and sell data from countless apps has made it so that anyone with a bit of cash and effort can figure out which phone in a so-called anonymized dataset belongs to a target, and abuse that information.
There is a whole industry devoted to re-identifying anonymized data. This was something that Snowden showed that the NSA could do. Now it’s available to everyone.
JonKnowsNothing • July 23, 2021 9:45 AM
@All
What is curious, is how the person was targeted in the first place?
or
Per the reports, it appears the Data Brokers were not aware of the true purpose or intended use for the data. Likely they don’t care much what you do with the data just as long as you pay for it.
But someone went to a lot of trouble and expense just the same. There are organizations that do target all kinds of persons, the “bounty hunter or entrapment” groups and some of them are well funded either privately or by LEAs.
Somebody had “An Axe To Grind”.