Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists.  It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017.  The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so.  The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.

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The data reviewed by Times Opinion didn’t come from a telecom or giant tech company, nor did it come from a governmental surveillance operation.  It originated from a location data company, one of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software slipped onto mobile phone apps.  You’ve probably never heard of most of the companies — and yet to anyone who has access to this data, your life is an open book.  They can see the places you go every moment of the day, whom you meet with or spend the night with, where you pray, whether you visit a methadone clinic, a psychiatrist’s office or a massage parlor.

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It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure the powers such always-on surveillance can provide an authoritarian regime like China’s.  Within America’s own representative democracy, citizens would surely rise up in outrage if the government attempted to mandate that every person above the age of 12 carry a tracking device that revealed their location 24 hours a day.  Yet, in the decade since Apple’s App Store was created, Americans have, app by app, consented to just such a system run by private companies.  Now, as the decade ends, tens of millions of Americans, including many children, find themselves carrying spies in their pockets during the day and leaving them beside their beds at night — even though the corporations that control their data are far less accountable than the government would be.

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Today, it’s perfectly legal to collect and sell all this information.  In the United States, as in most of the world, no federal law limits what has become a vast and lucrative trade in human tracking.  Only internal company policies and the decency of individual employees prevent those with access to the data from, say, stalking an estranged spouse or selling the evening commute of an intelligence officer to a hostile foreign power. 

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Companies say the data is shared only with vetted partners.  As a society, we’re choosing simply to take their word for that, displaying a blithe faith in corporate beneficence that we don’t extend to far less intrusive yet more heavily regulated industries.  Even if these companies are acting with the soundest moral code imaginable, there’s ultimately no foolproof way they can secure the data from falling into the hands of a foreign security service.  Closer to home, on a smaller yet no less troubling scale, there are often few protections to stop an individual analyst with access to such data from tracking an ex-lover or a victim of abuse.