The Daily - The Business of Selling Your Location

Episode Date: December 10, 2018

A New York Times investigation has found that the information being collected about us through apps on our smartphones is far more extensive than most of us imagine — or are aware we have consented to. Guests: Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Natasha Singer and Michael H. Keller, reporters who cover technology for The Times; and Gabriel J.X. Dance, deputy investigations editor. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.A note about this episode: The Times identified a small number of people in the location data with their permission. It did not identify anyone else in the data.

So I think people are used to the idea that they're being tracked in a sense. You know, they're aware that they're providing their location to apps for mapping or finding parking places, getting weather alerts, things like that. And they generally have a sense that in order for that to happen, a company somewhere has to know where they are. company somewhere has to know where they are. But I don't think people understand the magnitude of the data collection or the fact that it's spreading to dozens of companies who know where they are pretty much all the time. We really are being followed. Today, an investigation by my colleague, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries,

finds that the information being collected about us through apps on our smartphones is far more extensive than most of us imagine or are aware we have consented to. It's Monday, December 10th. Monday, December 10th. In the spring, I wrote a story about a location company that was collecting location data and allowing it to be accessed by law enforcement. And after I wrote that story, I got some tips that this space had really blown up in the past couple of years and was potentially more intrusive than it had been before. Jen started getting tips from researchers who were studying location data, and that gave her the idea that there was a much bigger story. So after that, I started working with a couple of colleagues here. I'm Natasha Singer, and I am a tech reporter in the Times

business section. And we began reaching out to some of these companies to try to figure out what was going on. Like, where is all this data going? What does it mean? What are the implications for consumers? And a lot of them gave us the cold shoulder, and even the ones that would talk had these sort of canned responses. Companies in the location data industry say that consumers knowingly turn on these location services. They're getting a benefit of localized information. The apps are free and are being paid for by location-based ads. And so it's a fair trade-off. And by the way, ladies, don't worry your pretty little heads about where the data is going because it's all anonymous. But it appeared that there was a huge gap

between what they were doing and what consumers understood they were doing. So we turned to the web. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. Thanks, everybody, for joining the webinar today. And we watched a lot of videos, webinars and videos. Today's webinar is titled Why Location is the Future of Digital Marketing.

Because even though they don't want to talk to the press, they do want to tell potential clients how awesome their services are. And actually start to paint a pretty nice picture of who somebody is based on the real world locations that they visit. And what they were saying is... Maybe I'm regularly visiting healthy recipe sites on my phone, but if you find me at a McDonald's three times a week... And what they were saying is,

It's really not valuable to know what people are doing online. But if we track their location, New York Sports Club on a regular basis, you probably have the confidence that they're a health-minded individual and the right person for you to speak to. This ability to see where you go shows who you really are. We look to understand who a person is based on where they've been and where they're going in order to influence what they're going to do next. As far as we know, there are dozens of companies doing this sort of thing, and one of them is called Ground Truth. A lot of these apps actually do update location information as often as once a minute. It owns its own app called Weatherbug that collects data on millions of people.

And as a result, we can paint a really accurate picture of a user's life journey with this data. And a VP from Ground Truth gave a webinar last year in which she was telling folks why location data is so great for marketing. We actually picked out just one single user's life journey and looked at where they went. What she says is we've even picked out an actual person for you. You saw that they went from work to the gym, picked up their dry cleaning and grocery store. So she shows this very detailed map. And on one side, it describes the single user as being a Hispanic woman in her 20s or 30s

who earns $80,000 a year. She hits up the park. She goes to a stop and shop. And they follow her from her home to work. And along this path that you see being drawn on the map, these business names pop up. So basically, the company can say, hey, Verizon, hey, Starbucks, here's somebody who is actually walking by your storefronts. You might want to advertise to them right at that time. And if you're a marketer, a brand, a store, this is really, really useful information. When we contacted the company for comment, they said, you know, that wasn't a real person,

that was a hypothetical person, that was aggregated information. And that may be true, but it still gives you a sense of how specific companies can be about where you are and how long you're spending there and what it means about your behavior. And so our original plan was to have a story about this industry and just the fact that it exists and what's going on. And it was a great story and we were ready to go. And then Jen got her hands on this secret treasure trove of data. Jen got her hands on this secret treasure trove of data. We came across a data set that really changed my view on the story.

Jen, Valentino DeVries, and I have been covering privacy separately since 2010. Our reporting has covered and triggered Senate investigations, House investigations, Federal Trade Commission investigations and fines, attorneys general investigations on the passage of state laws. And if you think of us like, you know, the Center for Disease Control has epidemiologists that track diseases. We have seen a lot of influenza. We've seen swine flu. We've seen measles. But when we saw this data set,

we looked at each other and it was like, this is the Ebola of privacy invasions. When Jen brought the data and we first looked at it, it was pretty shocking. We were absolutely floored. It was insane. My name is Michael Keller, and I am a reporter on the investigations team. My name is Gabriel Dance. I'm the deputy investigations editor

of the New York Times. So what you need to understand about this data set is it covers just a few days and just a very small part of the country. We were looking really just at New York City. The first image, we kind of imported it and saw these dots. A dot would appear and then a couple hundred dots would appear. Second by second, block by block. A couple thousand dots would appear. The dots were at Madison Square Garden. They were on ferry routes. They were in synagogues. They were all throughout Central Park. We saw these dots just slowly take over New York City. They were literally everywhere. And every single one of these dots was an instance in which a person's location had been sold to a company. It was freaky.

Each of those dots was a real person. And there were millions. The companies say that this data is all anonymous, but... The amount of information included in the data set is absolutely staggering. The specificity of the locations is incredible. The amount of times information is collected on individuals really would blow your mind. I mean, there was one person who had their location recorded over 14,000 times in one day. In one day. So we wanted to see what could actually be seen in this data.

So we decided to pick different locations around the city. And so we said, you know, show us all the people who passed through the New York Times building. And we had hundreds and thousands of dots that were passing through the New York Times building. And so that was interesting. And we could see where those dots were going. And many of them were going home to Brooklyn. And some of them were going home to New Jersey.

And some of them were going other places. And so I said, oh, well, can we look at other locations? Like, what about places people have an expectation of privacy? Yes, you can see this person around lunchtime. They drive over to a Planned Parenthood where they spend about two hours inside before going back home. And then we wanted to look even further. OK, so what do you want to see first? Like the people who travel with

the mayor? So one of those areas that we chose was Gracie Mansion, where the New York City mayor lives. And sure enough, several dots sitting outside Gracie Mansion and then following a path down to a YMCA that we know is the mayor's favorite YMCA, and then on to Staten Island. And when we cross-referenced those dots with the mayor's plans, they matched exactly. Yeah, so these dots, whoever they are, they're spending most of the day with the mayor. Those dots then went home to their residences on Long Island,

which we could also find specifically. So we also followed these dots to sensitive locations. Mike went and found a nuclear power plant covered in dots. And if you zoom in, you can trace them back to their homes, which then you can often tie to a name and other information about them. There's all kinds of risks that this data carries with it. I mean, the idea with the nuclear power plant, like if you wanted to find a guard who worked there because you were interested in blackmailing them, that would be possible. There could be data breaches. These companies could be hacked. China could be getting it. Russia could be getting it. Our own government could be getting it. Okay. So why are some purple?

So these are, the green and the purple are just... So Jen gets this amazing data set, and that would have been enough. But she decides, you know, we actually have to find some people in this data set to show their data to. And so this is Monday and Tuesday. Oh my gosh.

You could totally see the exact path that I take to and from work all the time. So Lisa is a teacher in upstate New York. You could just see my normal things that I do. And it's kind of complicated how we found her because we were committed to not identifying anyone in this data without their permission. But when we called Lisa up, she gave us permission to look her up in the data. And you can totally see how I drive to work. It's like steps.

You know, a lot of it is her going to her home and her work. This is where I park, you know, and this is my side of the building. I mean, it's even the curve, the way that the building is, that my classroom is on this side of the building. She is... This is shopping. Shopping. That is Weight Watchers.

Oh, and that's Marshalls. I spent more time in Marshalls than I did in Weight Watchers. She's going hiking out in these remote mountains, and her cell phone is still pinging. It's crazy. This is where my friend Claire lives. That's why there are so many dots there. You know, she's going to the gym. It's so funny that you could actually see me running around the stadium, you know?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. She's going to doctor's appointments. So this building is like my general practitioner. She's a very open person, so she was interested in seeing what this showed. But there were a few times where she was a little bit embarrassed by the date. That's my boyfriend's house. That's his house? Mm-hmm.

Yep. We weren't dating at that time. You know, it showed her visiting her ex-boyfriend's house. Oh. Uh-huh. They were broken up. And this was after they had stopped dating. All those dots are at my broken-up boyfriend's house.

Right, right. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And she laughed it off. Right. Yeah. But... I am a very open person.

Right. So I'm not secretive at all. But I look at a certain type of news article and then I'm inundated with more and more of those types of news articles. Right. You know, she, like a lot of us, is aware that she's being tracked online. And I am in this little information bubble. She's aware that there are algorithms analyzing her behavior online. And I feel like with the internet, every time I click on something, I'm just solidifying my bubble.

Yeah. You know? And she has changed her behavior in subtle ways. Sometimes I don't want to click on something because I don't want it to become part of my bubble. Yeah. Or I don't want to click on something because I don't want my bubble to be reinforced in a certain way. But I always thought of the tracking as far as what I'm clicking on on the internet. I never thought of the tracking of my GPS location and how that is being collected. I never thought about that.

I mean, I don't go anywhere that I would be, that I wouldn't want somebody to know about. But what if I was? What if I did? Going to my ex-boyfriend's house, you know? When he's my ex-boyfriend. Right. That's kind of, it's just strange.

Look, I've been covering privacy for years now. And one question I get a lot is, what's the harm? And, you know, you can point to national security concerns or potential identity theft, what have you. concerns or potential identity theft, what have you. But at the end of the day, I think that the knowledge that you are being watched all the time changes your behavior in little ways, but in deep ways. And, you know, when you're not free to behave in the way that you would naturally behave, I think that that is a harm at a pretty deep level. The point of the story, I think, ultimately, is that surveillance itself is a harm.

Just think about if you knew the exact location of somebody all the time, every day, how much you would know about them. And that is a pretty terrifying bit of power for these companies to have by holding information like this. Industry estimates that location-based mobile ads will hit more than $20 billion this year.

And that means that many of the ads you're seeing on your phone, whether it is from big companies like Amacy's or the Starbucks, U-Pass, everybody engaged in this wants a piece of this because they believe that you will be much more easily influenced by ads based on your immediate location or the places you've been? And one of the things we learned is that this is not just for advertising. There are other companies getting into this location data business and crunching these numbers for investors and financial firms like hedge funds. And they want to look at, you know, are a lot of people going to this particular set of stores? Maybe I should invest in them you know, are a lot of people going to this particular set of stores?

Maybe I should invest in them. Or are there a lot of people on this factory floor? Maybe that means they're going to be selling a lot of equipment. And all of this is coming from the location data you're sharing through the apps on your phone. We've been tidying up a little, making our privacy policies and terms more consistent, easier to read, and easier to understand.

And then you have the gatekeepers, Google and Apple, right? We're looking at every app in detail. What is it doing? Is it meeting the privacy policy that they're stating, right? And who say they're concerned about user privacy. Privacy to us is a human right. And Apple in particular... It's a civil liberty. Has marketed itself as the most privacy protective among the tech giants.

Well, Apple and Google, they both have financial incentives to keep app developers happy. It's part of what makes people want to buy their phones. And they've taken different approaches to this question. Apple has been making sure apps tell people why they might be wanting to use their location. But last year, Apple announced that it was going to notify people when an app was getting their location, even when they weren't using it, you know, like with the blue bar on their screen or something like that. And possibly because this made app developers pretty concerned and possibly because, you know, having a blue bar on your screen all the time might not look so great. They didn't go through with that.

Google also has done some things to limit the collection of location in the background by apps to just a few times an hour. But Google actually is itself a big collector of location data. Now, it doesn't sell that data, but it uses that in its own advertising products. It's funny because right now there's this whole reckoning around Facebook and data and privacy. And most of it is coming because of something that happened in 2015, actually. Tech giant Facebook is facing scrutiny this week after reports that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested data from about 50 million Americans. Which is when all of our information was being basically hoovered up by any third party who wanted it. Cambridge Analytica, the data privacy scandal which has created a nightmare scenario.

But we're very much in that same period of time again, except now it's actually with our physical real world location. except now it's actually with our physical real-world location. And most people are completely unaware that everywhere they go and everything they do is available for sale. Every aspect of our lives is being recorded or on its way to being recorded. And as of now, there are no federal laws specifically regulating the collection and use of consumers' location data. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The filing made Friday by federal prosecutors in Manhattan references individual one about 30 times.

Individual one is President Trump. And it appears to link him to campaign finance violations. It doesn't charge him with any wrongdoing, though. What's your takeaway? The latest court filing from prosecutors investigating President Trump and his lawyer, Michael Cohen, do not charge the president with a crime. But describe him as personally directing an illegal scheme to manipulate the 2016 election.

My takeaway is there's a very real prospect that on the day Donald Trump leaves office, the Justice Department may indict him, that he may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time. According to prosecutors, the president's payoffs to women who said they had sexual encounters with him

violated campaign finance law and represented an attempt by Trump and Cohen to defraud voters by keeping the women quiet. It's unclear whether a sitting president can be charged with violating campaign finance law,

but Democrats, like the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, on CBS's Face the Nation, said that Trump could be charged after he leaves office or face impeachment. We have been discussing the issue of pardons that the president may offer to people

or dangle in front of people. The bigger pardon question may come down the road as the next president has to determine whether to pardon Donald Trump. In a related development, Cohen, who is scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday for his role in the scheme, told prosecutors about a previously unknown contact with a Russian national who offered the Trump campaign, quote, political synergy and suggested a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin. Cohen never followed up on the offer

because he was already working with a different Russian national, whom he believed could help Trump build a tower in Moscow. That's it for the day. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.