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Louis - Midtown St. Louis - North Downtown St. Louis - Riverfront St. Louis - Washington Avenue ST. Louis - Bellefontaine St. Louis - Fairground Park St. Louis - North City ST. Louis - Dogtown St. Louis - Forest Park Southeast St. Louis - Soulard St. Louis - South City St. Louis - South Grand St. Louis - St. Louis Hills St. Louis - The Grove St. However, deanonymizing the anonymized data was a straightforward task for the researchers.
The location pings associated with each device revealed work and life patterns. Once the address of a home was located, public records for the home were accessed to provide the name of the person and often the name of his or her spouse or other persons occupying the property. It did not take long for researchers to deanonymize the data. They were able to track federal employees in almost every major government building in Washington, D. This included congressional advisors, department of defense officials, and Supreme Court judicial staff.
The observations also included thousands of pings inside the Pentagon, on military bases, in F. The researchers were even able to track a secret service agent assigned to President Trump.
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By proxy, the researchers were able to track the location of the president himself, capturing movements to within a few feet of accuracy on a day when the president traveled between Mar-a-Lago and nearby golf clubs, which also included a golf outing with the prime minister of Japan. Addressing the risks associated with location tracking has proven difficult for government institutions. Policies limiting employee use of location-sharing apps are difficult to enforce, particularly as they relate to personal devices. Further, compliance with such rules is complicated by the fact that users often cannot detect which apps are actually tracking them.
Spying over radio: GPS, cellular, and Wi-Fi
Even when cell phone use is prohibited within government buildings, risks still exist. The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies prohibit most personal phones within their facilities. These agencies also advise employees to turn off their personal devices before they arrive at their work location. However, researchers still located thousands of location pings in parking lots outside these buildings, with additional pings creating trails leading back to the homes of these employees and visitors.
Many of the risks present at government facilities pose similar threats to the courts. Every place judges visit could be tracked. Sensitive location information released publicly for the purpose of embarrassing or impugning the impartiality of a judge or court official could serve to undermine public confidence in the judiciary. Additionally, concerns regarding the security of the courts and the personal safety of judges are implicated.
The researchers were able to track dozens of phones within multiple Washington, D. One person whose movements researchers traced had a role in the technology division, which controls servers containing data for the Supreme Court. The courts across the United States have adopted a variety of policies regarding cell phones, with many permitting them within courthouses. While phone use is generally prohibited within courtrooms, courthouse hallways are commonly filled with litigants on their devices.
Some courts have banned the general public from bringing phones into the courthouse. However, these prohibitions have been increasingly met with pushback from the public and legal community who assert that such bans are overly burdensome for litigants, particularly pro se litigants who may rely on connectivity to aid in their cases, 7 and jurors who want to conduct personal business while they are not in jury selection, trial, or deliberations.
Vehicle GPS Tracking
Moreover, courts that prohibit the public and visitors from bringing phones into the courthouse often make exceptions for staff. Hence, even these courts are not signal-free. In one case, researchers noticed the recorded movements of a Microsoft engineer when he visited the campus of a Microsoft competitor, Amazon. Further information obtained the following month from employment announcements within the tech industry revealed the engineer started a new job at Amazon as a manager for an Amazon drone delivery service.
This travel and location information is recorded in a database and often tied directly to a home address, viewable by anyone with access to the data. Many of the apps we use collect and share our data with advertisers or other third parties.
This includes not only those apps that require our location information for functionality, such as mapping apps, but may include apps that we would not expect to utilize location data, such as a coupon saving app. The one-time permission requests and privacy disclosures we see when we download apps commonly go unread or are not fully understood before we accept them.
Even reading the fine print might not guarantee that your cell phone app will not transmit more information than you agreed to share. Security researchers have discovered many apps that share data beyond what users have consented to under the permission requests and privacy policies. For example, researchers found over 1, apps that shared data even after permission had been revoked or denied by the user.
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In one case, the popular weather app AccuWeather was sending location data even after users had turned location sharing off. Researchers can use cell phone location data to provide insights for transportation studies and government planners. The City Council of Portland, Oregon, approved a traffic and transit study to monitor millions of cell phones.
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Unicef announced a plan to use similar data to study epidemics, natural disasters, and demographics. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has placed some of these benefits in the public eye. Private technology companies have used cell phone location data to create heat maps demonstrating the potential impact that disregard for social distancing and travel guidelines could have on the spread of COVID One of these maps showed cell phones active on a Florida beach during spring break, as well as their subsequent movements throughout the country as the owners of these devices returned to school or home.
Notwithstanding the insight this use of location data can provide, critics have pointed out that this technology poses the same risks associated with other forms of location tracking. Apple and Google are jointly developing technology utilizing cell phone data in response to the pandemic for contact tracing. Instead, whenever cell phone users with the enabled technology come into close proximity with one other, their phones collect a randomized identifier number associated with the other person.
These identifier numbers change approximately every 15 minutes.