New: @stuartathompson and i received a trove of smartphone location data from 1/6. The set included about 100,000 location pings, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol at the time of the siege. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/capitol-attack-cellphone-data.html

The data tells a few stories. It offers granular details of how many people listened to Trump’ss speech and then went to the Capitol. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/capitol-attack-cellphone-data.html

The second story is about a broken, surreptitious industry in desperate need of regulation, and of a tacit agreement we’ve entered into that threatens everyone’s individual privacy. None of this data should ever have been collected.

This is the second location dataset @stuartathompson have had leaked to us. In the 13 months, we have seen the process the adtech industry uses to track and deanonymize this data has only gotten better...which is to say more invasive.

the justification for collecting this stuff is that it’s anonymous. it is a huge lie. instead it leads people back to their homes. ad IDs are easily cross referenced with other databases. it’s a joke.

If you take anything away: such data is collected & remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence, as happened in cities across America last summer. This industry is a threat. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/capitol-attack-cellphone-data.html?referringSource=articleShare