Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

Isn’t data this granular illegal, at least in the US? Obviously trying to make the data anonymous does nothing if you can still see the same user over time - I’ve only ever seen this data with users put into groups, and data points fuzzed.

Wow, this article is really interesting, but one thing I noticed is that the translation is generated and perfect! In fact if the header weren't there I'd have thought it was written by a native english speaker.

What I don’t get about this kind of thing is that it’s not just shady data resellers you’ve never heard of. It’s also overt, high profile, branded tech companies like Foursquare and Yelp, with huge amassed data sets of foot traffic, wifi scans, battery status, often paired with demographic info or data that can be joined by ad IDs or commercial device graphs.

If these companies are able to keep on truckin’ with massive user bases who don’t seem to care that the entire business model rests on flagrant violation of data privacy and data reselling, why would you ever expect anyone to care about the long tail of scammy lesser known data resellers?

Companies like Yelp or Foursquare are essentially as scammy as it can possibly be, with the scamminess shoved right in users’ faces, with lots of middle fingers and half-hearted sound bytes about respecting data privacy. If users don’t react in horror and delete accounts / stop contributing en masse in response to that, why would you ever think an expose about something a further ten degrees removed from the user’s immediate experiences is going to cause any reaction?

People just don’t care.

Most likely the users installed one of those free apps that ask for location access. Those apps collected the location, even when not ruining and uploaded for sale.

It is a pity they did not do better forensics on the installed apps. One or more were revealing the location.

It's alright but it's definitely not perfect. See the italics (emphasis mine) for a few quick examples in the first few sentences of the article.

"Over the past year, his cellphone has revealed where he has been for almost 24 hours."

"Nor do tens or thousands of other Norwegians."

"Just before eight o'clock in the evening, a perfect little boy comes to the world at Stavanger University Hospital."

EDIT: The rest of the article is littered with these minor errors every few sentences. I didn't bother including any more quotes here.