MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-06-17 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Spying in the name of the Virus will permanently
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/once-pariahs-location-tracking-firms-pitch-themselves-as-covid-sleuths-11592236894?mod=itp_wsj&ru=yahoo
Tech Firms Are Spying on You. In a Pandemic, Governments Say That’s OK.
Sam Schechner, Kirsten Grind and Patience Haggin
19-24 minutes
While an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Joshua Anton
created an app to prevent users from drunk dialing, which he called
Drunk Mode. He later began harvesting huge amounts of user data from
smartphones to resell to advertisers.
Now Mr. Anton’s company, called X-Mode Social Inc., is one of a number
of little-known location-tracking companies that are being deployed in
the effort to reopen the country. State and local authorities wielding
the power to decide when and how to reopen are leaning on these vendors
for the data to underpin those critical judgment calls.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office used data from Foursquare Labs
Inc. to figure out if beaches were getting too crowded; when the state
discovered they were, it tightened its rules. In Denver, the Tri-County
Health Department is monitoring counties where the population on average
tends to stray more than 330 feet from home, using data from Cuebiq Inc.
Researchers at the University of Texas in San Antonio are using movement
data from a variety of companies, including the geolocation firm
SafeGraph, to guide city officials there on the best strategies for
getting residents back to work.
Many of the location-tracking firms, data brokers and other middlemen
are part of the ad-tech industry, which has come under increasing fire
in recent years for building what critics call a surveillance economy.
Data for targeting ads at individuals, including location information,
can also end up in the hands of law-enforcement agencies or political
groups, often with limited disclosure to users. Privacy laws are
cropping up in states including California, along with calls for federal
privacy legislation like that in the European Union.
But some public-health authorities are setting aside those concerns to
fight an unprecedented pandemic. Officials are desperate for all types
of data to identify people potentially infected with the virus and to
understand how they are behaving to predict potential hot spots—whether
those people realize it or not.
Tables sat empty at a restaurant on San Francisco's popular Pier 39
tourist destination on March 12.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
That is giving data-collection companies a chance to revive their
battered public image.
“When you’re sharing your location data, you’re sharing it to
potentially be part of an overall bigger solution that could potentially
save someone’s life,” said Mr. Anton of X-Mode, which says it collects
location information from about 30 million devices a month in the U.S.
“I believe there will be a wide swath of the population that will
consent to that.”
The Wall Street Journal identified dozens of local governments and
agencies that are employing or considering using data from companies
that market tracking information, particularly as businesses reopen.
Apps that want to know where you are, say, to deliver a local weather
forecast or navigate a mall, sometimes include software from
location-tracking companies.
The companies collect information such as your latitude, longitude as
well as sometimes speed and direction, along with a unique advertising
ID tied to your phone.
That information is stored in a massive database of every breadcrumb of
movement for each device, sometimes with advertising IDs obfuscated to
make it more difficult to determine the original number.
This is a slice of one of those databases, from Reveal Mobile Inc. Every
dot is the location of a mobile device in San Francisco during a single
hour on Jan. 31, 2020.
Over a 24-hour period, the data reveals the movement of those devices.
People can be seen moving through downtown San Francisco...
...crossing the Bay Bridge...
...and walking in Golden Gate Park.
Contractors and clients will sometimes get the full data set to
visualize, and sometimes they get only aggregated data, showing averages
for local data, say at the level of a census block group, which
generally include between 600 and 3,000 people.
Some companies are marketing dashboards that summarize the data and
generate analytics on hotspots.
Some of these tools allow users to focus on devices that were spotted at
specific points of interest, for instance showing where people who
gathered in Golden Gate Park later travelled.
Joel Eastwood and Dylan Moriarty/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Sources: Reveal Mobile (location data); AFP/Getty Images (iPhone)
Some of the tech companies, including X-Mode and Skyhook Wireless Inc.,
have supplied detailed location data to federal-government contractors
or to agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
according to people familiar with those deals.
These efforts are distinct from an unusual partnership between Apple
Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit to build an infrastructure to help
notify people who have been close to others known to be infected with
the virus. That project is one of several, including some spearheaded by
universities, that rely on apps that users must find, download and
activate before they start collecting data.
By contrast, the data being offered by location-tracking companies
usually don’t come from a dedicated app. Instead those companies rely on
stores of information they have already collected—and continue to
collect—from millions of devices running unrelated mobile apps to which
users have granted permission to access their locations.
For privacy reasons, Apple and Google have said they won’t allow the
exposure-notification apps using their system to access location
services on users’ phones. Some local officials say it makes them less
useful for tracking population movements or finding hot spots.
That is paving the way for other data providers to rush in.
X-Mode data on the locations of mobile devices fuels this visualization,
from San Francisco-based OmniSci, of the density of people visiting
points of interest in Florida in March.
Photo: OmniSci, X-Mode (device-location data), SafeGraph (point of
interest data)
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco are using
data collected from “smart” thermometers made by the private company
Kinsa Inc. to track flare-ups of fever around the San Francisco area,
said George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology, who is advising the
California Department of Public Health.
Mr. Rutherford said he and his colleagues, in advising the state’s
health department, are also considering other data that companies have
been posting free online. When the virus first began to spread in the
U.S., Mr. Rutherford turned to data from OpenTable, the
restaurant-reservation company, to track where residents of San
Francisco were gathering. By the end of February, there were far more
vacant seats at restaurants in San Francisco than in Los Angeles and New
York, as more people stayed home.
Share Your Thoughts
What do you think of cities and states using tracking data during the
pandemic? Join the conversation below.
Foursquare launched in 2009 as a social-media darling, allowing users to
share their locations with friends and check in as the mayor of their
favorite dive bar. Realizing the potential for selling its data, it
pivoted to providing location-based services for other apps, such as
AccuWeather Inc.
Foursquare collects data from about 25 million devices globally through
location check-in apps that it runs, such as Swarm, or dozens of apps
that it partners with that it doesn’t disclose.
Less than six months ago, Foursquare was publicly calling for increased
regulation, saying it was needed to restore trust in the
location-tracking industry.
Now the state of California is using Foursquare data, among other
governments Foursquare declined to disclose, for pandemic response.
The data provided by Foursquare are “helping us deliver the right
messaging in different jurisdictions,” said Ali Bay, a spokeswoman for
the California Department of Public Health. The state says it is
accessing free data from Foursquare that tracks population movement on
an aggregate, rather than an individual, level.
Public health authorities, developers and tech companies are working on
apps to help us keep track of who we came in contact with and where
we’ve been to aid in Covid-19 contact-tracing efforts. WSJ’s Joanna
Stern explains the technologies using an 8-bit video game.
A Foursquare spokeswoman said it collects data only from users who have
apps with location services turned on. “We are proud of our reputation
for being a responsible, trusted partner, and we hold ourselves to a
high standard,” a Foursquare spokeswoman said.
Antonio Tomarchio, who founded location-tracking firm Cuebiq in 2016 for
marketers, is offering several sets of aggregate data free, including
the tracking system used by the health department in Denver. Mr.
Tomarchio declined to comment on other governments and institutions
using its data.
While “the data can be extremely valuable,” Mr. Tomarchio says the
company works to make sure users’ privacy is protected.
Customers lined up outside a Denver wine shop in March as city officials
debated whether liquor stores and recreational marijuana dispensaries
should remain open as essential businesses.
Photo: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images
Mr. Anton, the founder of Washington, D.C.-based X-Mode, first got the
idea for Drunk Mode in 2013, after receiving a phone call from an
inebriated friend. Users could activate the app to block the ability to
call certain numbers for a set period. Later features aimed to help
people party more safely, such as by offering a way to track a friend,
hail a car, or retrace their footsteps from the night before if they
were too drunk to remember.
Early on, the company cycled through business models. At one point, they
tried selling a gadget called the Wine Rack, a sports bra with a straw
and a bladder to hold a beverage. In 2015, the company began selling
data and later offered its software to build into other apps.
X-Mode says it now collects detailed location information from more than
300 apps, such as weather and navigation apps, many of which need users’
location to function well. X-Mode pays the developers of those apps to
integrate its tracking software into their designs.
Mr. Anton says X-Mode has been pushing apps that include its software to
insert pop-ups that more prominently notify users that their location
data may be used for tailored ads and research.
The company doesn’t disclose the apps’ names, citing mainly the risk of
tipping off competitors.
Some apps disclose in their privacy policies, however, that X-Mode is
built into them. One such app is What The Forecast?!!, a weather tracker
that delivers local conditions using curse words.
X-Mode then licenses access to its data sets to other businesses,
typically ad-tech companies selling targeted ads, investors looking to
analyze business trends or app developers interested in knowing what
places their users frequent.
During the pandemic, X-Mode has emerged as among the more prolific
location-data providers. The company’s data fed a partnership with
Tectonix, a Maryland-based data-visualization company, to produce
graphics showing the impact of social distancing—or the lack of it.
One of the visualizations, which Tectonix posted on Twitter, shows its
dashboard zooming down into a cloud of orange dots crowding a beach in
Fort Lauderdale, Fla., during spring break. The posting then shows the
results of what it calls a “spider query” to show how devices on that
beach later traveled across the country—with their owners potentially
spreading the new coronavirus.
The charts went viral on Twitter.
“The phone started ringing that Saturday across the board, and it hasn’t
stopped really ringing, which has been great,” X-Mode’s Mr. Anton said.
Like some other data providers, X-Mode is offering free one-month
subscriptions to its Covid-19 data to researchers and nonprofits on a
data exchange operated by Amazon. The company has also advertised a
commercial 12-month subscription to its “COVID-19 Daily Geolocation
Data” in the U.S. for $600,000, according to a posting on the exchange.
In New York City and other cities and states, officials have considered
a “Pandemic Management Platform” from the Covid Alliance, which
integrates X-Mode data to display aggregated information about
population movements in the city, a Covid Alliance spokesman said. A
spokesman for New York City confirmed the talks but said no commitment
has been made.
Officials could, for instance, use the system to visualize which
residential communities are home to many people who work in nursing
homes, which it would determine by looking at the nighttime locations of
phones that visited the facility every day, a Covid Alliance
representative said.
“Everything is a little bit of a privacy trade-off. But in general we do
privacy trade-offs every single day in the course of our normal business
of life,” said Stephen Levin, a New York City councilman in Brooklyn.
“Nothing I’ve seen so far is any more of a trade-off than taking an Uber.”
X-Mode also has a deal to provide location data to San Francisco-based
OmniSci, which is pitching analysis and mapping services using that
information, as well as data from other providers, such as SafeGraph, to
federal and state authorities. OmniSci says its analyses could help
officials identify potential virus outbreaks as the country reopens.
Todd Mostak, OmniSci’s chief executive, recently let a Journal reporter
watch as he used his system to filter X-Mode data from five million
devices to focus only on those that had spent at least 24 hours in a
Florida hospital over the last two weeks of March. Mr. Mostak then
drilled down to show which points of interest those phones had visited
earlier in the month, including major attractions like Walt Disney World
and minor ones, like a large supermarket in Fort Myers, which the data
indicated had been visited by 12 of the devices.
“You can kind of determine what the transmission vectors are for the
disease and potentially shut down hot spots you might not otherwise be
able to see,” Mr. Mostak said.
He added that his company is working on a way to automate such analyses
so that they spit out only lists of establishments and their risk
scores, making it harder to identify individuals.
A map of Dallas County, Texas, on the Covid Alliance dashboard for local
governments to observe activity at businesses and other points of
interest based on data collected through apps on users' smartphones.
Photo: COVID ALLIANCE
X-Mode says it contractually bars its partners from using its data to
identify individuals.
Debates over the use of such data have flared up among local government
officials nationwide—particularly in cities and counties that have never
had to rely on outside companies to track their residents, and are now
scrambling to secure contracts.
In Kansas, tensions broke out among state lawmakers and privacy
advocates when it was revealed in late March that the state was using
public data from the New York-based firm Unacast to track residents.
“The wholesale collection of cellular and GPS data raises significant
privacy issues,” wrote the nonprofit Kansas Justice Institute to Gov.
Laura Kelly, according to a copy of the letter.
Unacast chief executive Thomas Walle said the company doesn’t give
Kansas direct access to its raw data, and that its public data couldn’t
be interpreted beyond anonymized and aggregated insights at the state
and county levels.
Phunware Inc., an Austin-based enterprise software company that
typically builds location-aware tools for companies and organizations,
has been bullish on the potential for apps and location data to help the
country reopen. The company, which built the new app for President
Trump’s re-election campaign, says it can help governments “identify
emerging hot zones,” by cross-referencing the location histories of
devices belonging to people that governments know to be infected with
the histories of devices belonging to other people, according to a
presentation viewed by the Journal.
The company’s prices for the system range from $42,500 a month to
$120,000 a month, depending on how many mobile devices it covers, the
presentation showed.
Alan Knitowski, Phunware’s CEO, said in interviews that the company has
won a deal to build a “smart city” app for Pasadena, Texas, a suburb of
Houston, aimed at helping the city come out of coronavirus lockdown. The
app will collect residents’ locations initially to allow the city to
send localized alerts and recommendations about new outbreaks, Phunware
executives said. The city said it plans to keep using the app for other
emergencies, too.
“When you have a global pandemic, privacy will destroy your attempts to
resolve the problem,” says Mr. Knitowski.
—Byron Tau contributed to this article.
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner-at-wsj.com, Kirsten Grind at
kirsten.grind-at-wsj.com and Patience Haggin at patience.haggin-at-wsj.com
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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