ABSTRACT
Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies—largely unregulated, little scrutinized—are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. Location data companies generally downplay the risks of collecting such revealing information at scale. For many Americans, the only real risk they face from having their information exposed would be embarrassment or inconvenience.
