Via your cellphone. It’s very common these days as Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan write in the New York Times:
The device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls. Let’s stop calling them phones. They are trackers.
Most doubts about the principal function of these devices were erased when it was recently disclosed that cellphone carriers responded 1.3 million times last year to law enforcement requests for call data. That’s not even a complete count, because T-Mobile, one of the largest carriers, refused to reveal its numbers.
And it gets much worse than that:
There is an even more fascinating and diabolical element to what can be done with location information. New research suggests that by cross-referencing your geographical data with that of your friends, it’s possible to predict your future whereabouts with a much higher degree of accuracy.
This is what’s known as predictive modeling, and it requires nothing more than your cellphone data.
Fun, fun, fun for marketers and the government. For you if you value your privacy not so much.
