Total Surveillance Is Not What America Signed Up For

It is a federal crime to open a piece of junk mail that’s addressed to someone else. Listening to someone else’s phone call without a court order can also be a federal crime.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the location data served up by mobile phones is also covered by constitutional protections. The government can’t request it without a warrant.

But the private sector doesn’t need a warrant to get hold of your data. There’s little to prevent companies from tracking the precise movements of hundreds of millions of Americans and selling copies of that dataset to anyone who can pay the price.

The incongruity between the robust legal regime around legacy methods of privacy invasion and the paucity of regulation around more comprehensive and intrusive modern technologies has come into sharp relief in an investigation into the location data industry by Times Opinion. The investigation, which builds on work last year by The Times’s newsroom, was based on a dataset provided to Times Opinion by sources alarmed by the power of the tracking industry. The largest such file known to have been examined by journalists, it reveals more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans across several major cities.