MapLab: Location, Location, Location

Last week, a New York Times investigation revealed how many of the apps on your phone track your location data in order to package and sell it to advertisers, at remarkably high resolution. Trips to hospitals, government offices, jails, and clinics; your kid’s school by day and your ex’s house by night: companies are registering these types of coordinates frequently (every 21 minutes in one dataset, the Times found) and making biographical inferences about you, for the basic purpose of nudging you towards places you’ll buy stuff.

Read the article in full, especially to explore the impactful interactive visualizations the Times created. Given the hailstorm of data privacy revelations in 2018, the findings of the article themselves aren’t necessarily stunning. If you pay attention to the tech industry, you know that your data is a core product for many of the services you use on your phone—as much as, if not more so than, the services themselves. “Location intelligence” is no exception; indeed, it’s a $21 billion industry.