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Mobilewalla used cellphone data to estimate the demographics of protesters

369 points by psychanarch 6y ago

wizzwizz4 6y ago
> Datta [Mobilewalla CEO] said Mobilewalla didn’t prepare the report for law enforcement or a public agency, but rather to satisfy its own employees' curiosity about what its vast trove of unregulated data could reveal about the demonstrators. Datta told BuzzFeed News that the company doesn’t plan to include information about whether a person attended a protest to its clients, or to law enforcement agencies. > Mobilewalla does not collect the data itself, but rather buys it from a variety of sources, including advertisers, data brokers, and internet service providers.
- Blahah 6y ago
  So really a whole load of different companies are tracking tons of people, and anyone can buy and aggregate the data, then query it for insights. It's good that they publicised it rather than capitalising on it.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    Mobilewalla literally exists for the primary purpose of capitalizing on that data.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    They also mentioned their disapproval of riots and that they were worried about 'outside agitators', so it reads very much as if they went looking for the data to support their theory. The notion of wicked 'outside agitators' has often been thrown out by politicians who don't want to engage with an issue; it's an old trope that was used to delegitimize the civil rights movement in the 1960s by blaming it on communists or the influence of Martin Luther King. He commented on the trope explicitly in one of his Letters from Birmingham Jail: Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. Most recently, this was heard in Georgia following the death of Rayshard Brooks, and a subsequent riot in which a Wendy's restaurant was burnt down. A cry went up about 'outside agitators' and suspicion fell on a woman pictured at the scene; it turned out she was the late Mr Brooks' girlfriend.
    - Ar-Curunir 6y ago
      The current iteration of the trope also infantilizes actual black protestors and rioters, as if only “white outsider anarchists” can lead black folks to express their anger in ways that don’t please white notions of “model minorities”
  - sambull 6y ago
    If you expect a discount on your mcmuffin expect your data to be sold. That's the only reason store apps exist. To exfiltrate your data including tracking your movements.
- mc32 6y ago
  This almost mirrors OkCupid’s dataviz articles they’d do for publicity. The data is aggregate data. It shows mostly males, in the 18-34 age bracket, mostly white. The CEO whose surname is Datta. Quite appropos.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Reminder: OKCupid is owned by Match Group (also owns Tinder, Plenty of Fish, BlackPeopleMeet, OurTime, Twoo, match.com, and others), which sells their entire profile database (unredacted(!), with full names, sexual preferences, locations, and photos) to data brokers[1]. Very few services are immune from this. I learned recently that Airbnb (YC W09) actually sells your chat logs[2] and stay history(!) to data brokers, which can be used for stalking or kidnapping in the wrong hands. Coinbase (YC S12) is also one of the companies that sells your activity log (including IP addresses and timestamps, which amounts to a location tracklog) to a third party without your explicit consent (other than creating a Coinbase account). 1: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59vbp5/shady-data-brokers-are-selling-online-dating-profiles-by-the-millions https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59vbp5/shady-data-brokers... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-score-access.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-...
    - pjc50 6y ago
      Sounds like a GDPR fine waiting to happen.
      - dreggie 6y ago
        CCPA is really focused on sellers and aggregators of personal data, and this is a perfect example of why they need regulation.
    - crobertsbmw 6y ago
      That vice article is more interesting than the OPs one.
    - sukilot 6y ago
supahfly_remix 6y ago
The reports showed ethnicity of the protestors. Is this inferred from ad preferences? Or, is there a database that keeps this?
- akerro 6y ago
  It's US so mobile providers, ISP very likely have such data from being voluntary provided by customers.
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    Are you implying that US ISP's ask the race of their customers? I've never been asked by AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, Spectrum, or other ISPs I've used.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      I'm not in the business but I'd guess that an ISP can determine with pretty high confidence your race, ethnicity, gender, approximate age and approximate income simply by analyzing your DNS requests. And they probably have a lot more data than DNS.
      - jtbayly 6y ago
        Agreed, but I wouldn't describe that as "being voluntary provided by customers."
- agakshat 6y ago
  The report mentions ethnicity is inferred from browsing history, which they are also able to purchase from data brokers.
- jleach82 6y ago
  It comes from many different places and is cross-correlated at many levels. From credit card purchase history to social media to phone location data, across multiple agents and brokers throughout the data market. See: Data Breaches, Crisis and Opportunity (ISBN 978-0-13-450678-4)
ojnabieoot 6y ago
> “It’s hard to tell you a specific reason as to why we did this,” [Mobilewalla CEO Anindya] Datta said. “But over time, a bunch of us in the company were watching with curiosity and some degree of alarm as to what’s going on.” He defined those sources of alarm as what he called "antisocial behavior," including vandalism, looting, and actions like "breaking the glass of an Apple store.” He added that they were attempting to test if protests were being driven by outside agitators. Probably not the best defense to be made when people are concerned that this technology is being used to suppress and monitor protestors...
- throwaway29639 6y ago
  The people breaking glass in an Apple store are violent criminals. Peaceful protestors exercising their first amendment right to assembly should applaud the ability to remove violent members from their ranks. Your pull quote describes a company concerned about criminals. The actions they are concerned with are not constitutionally protected. Probably not the best attack to lump together rioters and protestors. And I thought all the rioters at the protests were white supremacists trying to start shit anyway; don't you want to track them?
  - burkaman 6y ago
    Only speaking for myself, but no, I don't think tracking all citizens to determine which ones are white supremacists is a good idea.
    - smitty1e 6y ago
      This information is Checkov's Gun[1]. Stipulate that the current crop of businesses and customers are ethical. There are zero (0) guarantees regarding what happens in the next act. So more thought is needed about the who/what/where/when/why about collecting data. The newest and shiniest technology is not automatically optimal in the long term. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun
    - throwaway20394 6y ago
aszantu 6y ago
I remember that there was some protest survival guide, and it mentioned to either leave the smartphone at home, or bring a dumb phone w/o contract, so you can at least call an ambulance if need be.
- AlphaGeekZulu 6y ago
  Exactly! Never bring a smartphone to a protest and keep the dumb phone shut off, except if an emergency qualifies otherwise. There are hundreds of reasons for not bringing a smartphone, not only the abuse of companies like Mobilewalla. Imagine if you happen to be close to a storefront that is vandalized or a statue that is brought down - cellphone data will make you a terrorist suspect! (At least in the current US).
  - whoopdedo 6y ago
    More specifically, this undermines the stated justification for Mobilewalla's report. Which was to determine the amount of protestors who came from outside the cities they appeared in. If I'm the operator of a protests-as-a-service company the first thing I do is make sure none of the people have a cell phone that can be used to trace them back to me. But that was the stated justification. The real purpose of the report is to advertise what Mobilewalla does. I consider this a form of profiteering.
    - sukilot 6y ago
      If you assume that everyone has perfect Opsec, then there is now need for law enforcement at all, because all crime would be undetectable.
- aesh2Xa1 6y ago
  Why would you need to hide having participated in a protest? It is an act which is protected by the First Amendment in the US Constitution.
  - sukilot 6y ago
zucker42 6y ago
Does anyone know more specifically how a company like Mobilewalla gets location data? Is it from Google, or from apps people open on their phone, or from trackers on websites, or from cell data, or from something else? Also, is there any way to prevent Google from tracking the location of my Android phone short of uninstalling Android?
- jleach82 6y ago
  The data is all over. It goes through brokers and agents and multiple companies that perform various aggregations and shapings... Data Breaches, Crisis and Opportunity (ISBN 978-0-13-450678-4)
- julesallen 6y ago
  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/14/how-to-turn-off-google-location-tracking https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/14/how-to-tu... Basically use somebody else's maps, at the extreme end you can opt out of find my phone, and just don't manually use any Google services at all.
- agakshat 6y ago
  Very often, it’s the phone networks which are selling our location data to these brokers. There is virtually no regulation on this, and for phone companies it’s basically free money.
  - zucker42 6y ago
    Does the ethnicity data also come from phone companies?
    - agakshat 6y ago
      I hope not, but I expect that with a few days of browsing history it’s trivial to predict ethnicity.
    - rhizome 6y ago
      Probably easier to get it via match.com and their subsidiaries.
ogre_codes 6y ago
It seems like it would be very difficult to distinguish which side of the police line someone is on based on a pile of demographics. How many of those are protestors versus police? Likewise, National Guard, reporters, fire department, medical, etc. If they separated them out, it doesn't say they did in the article or even hint at an attempt.
- jleach82 6y ago
  I don't think so. Read this: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-help... I am fairly confident they can easily tell which way someone leans on the matter.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Government workers are a tiny fraction of population at a protest.
jleach82 6y ago
Data Breaches, Crisis and Opportunity (ISBN 978-0-13-450678-4) I always "knew" that mass data is evaluated for many things, but I had no idea how much I didn't know. That book - besides being an excellent reference for anyone responsible for protecting data - is unsettling in showing the depth of the market and how it works. The topic headline doesn't even scratch the surface.
rydre 6y ago
[deleted]
- jleach82 6y ago
  Part of the problem is that this type of data collection and market environment evolves much more quickly than legislation can ever keep up. They're trying, but..
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Data collection existed in the US, and probably most major markets, a century ago, it's just that then it was primarily keyed on mailing address instead of telephone number. Legislators are never going to do anything about it unless absolutely forced to, because they rely on targeted campaigns themselves. (and if you're in the US, it gets worse. When I lived in California, I asked my letter carrier if I could put a "no junk mail please" sign on the box like we do here. I was told to please not call it junk mail, but "bulk mail", as it provides a significant fraction of their funding.) Anyone up for a game of 35 questions? Edit: https://www.msp-pgh.com/history-direct-mail-marketing/ https://www.msp-pgh.com/history-direct-mail-marketing/ > The American Anti-Slavery Society printed and mailed marketing materials to religious and civic leaders in the south in 1835. This is likely the first direct mail campaign. They created a mailing list from names in newspapers and city directories, among other public lists. the poorly-targeted campaign was not well-received: https://postalmuseum.si.edu/node/1912 https://postalmuseum.si.edu/node/1912
mc32 6y ago
>” If [this data] ends up in hands of the government, or if protesters are concerned that it could end up in the hands of the government, that may suppress speech, it may deter people from going to protests,” Hussain said.” At this point I don’t think it’s government so much as private companies I’m concerned about. Candidates silently get ignored depending on what this kind of data shows.
shadowgovt 6y ago
That's definitely going to continue to be a thing. New technology adds new ways to protest and counter-protest. Cell phones have brought us mass-tracking and flash-mobs.
dubcanada 6y ago
Not to wear a tinfoil hat, but couldn't this data be entirely made up? It also seems to imply that the data is 100% accurate. And that is also wrong based on what I see.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Sure. Any researcher could be lying.
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
Between the article and the orig report, I found the data presented in a confusing way. > "African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females" Then follows pie charts showing Caucasians outnumbered African-Americans 6:1. It looks like what they meant was 'among African-American protesters, the majority were male'.
- mc32 6y ago
  Yes that’s what they meant. It is really poorly worded. They could have used a copy editor to check that. That said it looks like males dominated most of the charts in most cities cited.
- gus_massa 6y ago
  The square with the color in the legend is very small, so it's very difficult to understand what the pies represent. (I don't understand how they choose the colors.)
fmakunbound 6y ago
How do these ass-clowns get stuff like mobile application I'm using https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4309344/Mobilewalla%20Data%20Dictionary%20(1)%20(1).pdf https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4309344/Mobilewalla%20Data%20... https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4309344/Content%20Offers/Mobilewalla%20Data%20Dictionary_Aggregated_FEB2020.pdf https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4309344/Content%20Offers/Mobi... and even location data https://www.mobilewalla.com/places-of-interest-data-schema https://www.mobilewalla.com/places-of-interest-data-schema Do carriers ship some kind of Mobilewalla telemetry app on the phone people use?
- jmatthews 6y ago
  Having done some work in this space I can tell you the exact process. Applications on your phone provide a maid. Mobile Application ID. Which reports back it's(the phones) geo location. Using some basic statistics regarding location, duration of stay, time of day, you infer home address, work address. Once you have a small foothold you go to aggregated data repositories and run a query. Once you get a positive hit the rest is dead simple.
  - kjaftaedi 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, are you able to provide any examples of these aggregated data repositories?
    - soared 6y ago
      Data management platform 'dmp' is the software where these segments are stored and used in advertising. ie http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/data-directory-2810741.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/data-directory-2810...
  - mtgp1000 6y ago
    I had been paranoid about this for some time, thanks for confirming. It is so trivially easy to decipher a person's life from their location data, especially with some simple ML. The fact that it's so easy ensures in my mind that it's only a matter of time before this data falls into the hands of a true authoritarian administration.
Vervious 6y ago
I'm confused why hacker news thinks collecting demographic data is a bad thing, and is all about regulating it... when everyone's personal website has google analytics installed and is doing the exact same thing. Yet we don't bat an eye at it.
- Vervious 6y ago
  Seriously though, doesn't it strike any of you as absolutely hypocritical? We're attacking data collection in public spaces in real life, while defending it in our own domain (virtual life). I know that a lot of tech industry paychecks come from monetizing people's data...
  - zucker42 6y ago
    It's quite possibly different people arguing either side.
  - jacobr1 6y ago
    Part of the difference is scope and purpose. I'm ok with Amazon using my purchase, and product viewing data, to recommend products I might like to purchase. I'm even ok with them using aggregated data to determine where to invest in white-labled products, fix UX issues, or find fraud rings. What I'm not ok with, is them selling my data, combining it with cellphone data, netflix viewing data, creditcard data, magazine subscriptions, email subscriptions, and many others, and building personal profiles that governments, political organizations, and commercial enterprises I don't have a direct relationship with to abuse. I don't think it is a slippery-slope from from the more narrow, single-firm use case to the broad-profile-being abused. GDPR and similar regulation is one way we can get there. We are going to need probably another generation of people and laws to figure out the right regulatory norms and frameworks, but it seems like a tractable problem.
    - soared 6y ago
      Amazon doesn't sell your data. You can't have a legitimate discussion about this on HN because no one does their research and so just make outrageously incorrect claims like that. Netflix, apple, etc don't sell data. There is no such thing as building a 'personal profile' by combining data from all these different sources. Data is licensed in aggregate, and typically anything under 1,000 user ids can't be used. Unless your bringing in data yourself, you can't build profiles on individuals. I 100% agree that we need major privacy regulation, but the first step in that is putting in effort to actually understand and discuss the facts.
kome 6y ago
btw, it is common (in france) for the police to use "scanners" to grab all the phone numbers of protesters.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  Also here - read up on 'IMSI catchers'.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
austincheney 6y ago
I wonder if that data can be correlated against recent Covid spikes. The cities in Texas showing the most dramatic rise in diagnosis are also those that experienced the largest quantities of protests delayed exactly the same amount of time as the incubation period.
- DailyHN 6y ago
  That doesn't explain Florida. The biggest days of protests nationwide were rained out in FL.
- danso 6y ago
  That wouldn't explain the flat rates in NYC [0] or Minneapolis and St. Paul (Hennepin/Ramsey County) [1] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronavirus-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronav... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/minnesota-coronavirus-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/minnesota-corona... edit: Also, Texas had a Phase 3 reopening on June 3, which is around the time of peak protest: https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-announces-phase-iii-to-open-texas https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-announces-ph...
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    A few weeks ago, I remember Cuomo patting himself and New Yorkers on the back for continuing to see a decline in cases. It's a lot easier to do that when 20% of NYC residents have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, and that was in May. I'm sure this limited spread during protests somewhat in NYC. That said, social distancing during protests, being outdoors, how many people had active infections (this varies wildly across the US), mask use, actions (positive and negative) by the police, and living situations of the protesters (alone in an apartment or four roommates) all have an effect.
    - nostrademons 6y ago
      Only in the presence of social distancing or other countermeasures. 20% antibodies means that you could have an R = 1.25 and still get an effective R < 1.0, preventing further onwards transmission. R0 estimates for COVID-19 ranged from 2.5-6, so by itself 20% of the population with antibodies wouldn't do anything (it'd reduce R to 2-4.8, which is still pretty quick exponential spread, faster than the flu). However, R in the U.S. around the time of the protests was measured at about 1.07, because it wasn't fully opened up yet and many people are staying home out of fear. Under those conditions NYC gets an effective R = 0.85 (epidemic dies out), while a state with 2% antibodies has an effective R = 1.05, which is still positive (albeit slow) exponential spread. I suspect it's a combination of the lax social distancing requirements + lack of immunity. NYC would still be experiencing exponential spread without existing immunity, but it's only because they're still locked down that the level of immunity they have can prevent an epidemic.
truculent 6y ago
> Mobilewalla does not collect the data itself, but rather buys it from a variety of sources, including advertisers, data brokers, and internet service providers. So we can mobilise to use this data for profiling protestors, but not to help tackle a pandemic which is spreading concurrently?
- thatlongthrow1 6y ago
  They don't get the fine detailed data that is needed for contact tracing.
- nodelessness 6y ago
  We cant we just dont care to.
- soared 6y ago
  This data has an accuracy of something like ~80ft on average. https://www.mobilemarketer.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/research/22928.html#:~:text=Author&text=While%20mobile%20location%20data%20is,%2C%20potentially%20impacting%20marketers'%20programs https://www.mobilemarketer.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/re....
  - truculent 6y ago
    Ah, right - less than I thought. I suppose that could be useful for mass-gatherings but generally we should not have those anyway. Thank you for the correction
sitkack 6y ago
Much of this data comes from a company called https://www.airsage.com/ https://www.airsage.com/ The anonymization is a joke, they had fixed IDs over I think a 30 day window. Airsage should be shut down and C-levels to the board should be jailed for wire tapping.
tzs 6y ago
It gives what percentage of the protestors were black in each city, 18% in Atlanta, 3% in Los Angeles, 11% in Minneapolis, and 14% in New York City. In all of those cities that's lower than the percentage of black people in the general population, so black people were underrepresented. But they were much more underrepresented in Los Angeles and Atlanta than in Minneapolis or New York. Here's a table. First column is percent among protestors. Second is percent among general population. Third is first column as a percent of second column. 18 52 35 Atlanta 3 11 27 Los Angeles 11 19 58 Minneapolis 14 24 58 New York City I.e., in New York and Minneapolis you had close to 60% as many black people as you would have expected if you just went by city demographics. In Atlanta it was only 35% and only 27% in Los Angeles. I wonder if there is some factor, especially in Los Angeles and Atlanta, that discouraged black people from wanting to attend or some hardship to attending that disproportionately fell on black people?
- bzb3 6y ago
  Or maybe they simply didn't agree with the premise of the protests.
  - stronglikedan 6y ago
    Of the people I've talked to in real life, most don't, so these numbers are not too surprising to me.
- brobdingnagians 6y ago
  Someone interviewed white people in New York about abolishing police and lots of them whole-heartedly agreed. They interviewed black people in New York about it, and they said it was insane to want to do that. That would fit these statistics.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    It wouldn't explain the wide statistical variation between cities.
  - DanHulton 6y ago
loraa 6y ago
It's beautiful how people get the latest and greatest smart phone, never read the manual, turn on all the features and keeps all setting at default, eats out of Google or apples ass, and then complain that their privacy has been violated? Really?
one2know 6y ago
If you have been watching live streams, you will learn many protesters don't understand what a "live stream" is, because the streamer tries to explain it to them and they still think it is a recording that can be deleted.
- not2b 6y ago
  But while it initially goes out live, after the live stream ends the video becomes a recording, which can be deleted.
  - one2know 6y ago
    On one stream I watched, the streamer tells a protester they are live streaming. The protester literally says, "I don't know what that is." And actually recordings can't be deleted because viewers are recording the live stream and have their own copies instantly which they upload to twitter or youtube.
  - QuercusMax 6y ago
    Unless someone saves that stream.
andai 6y ago
How was this data collected? They bought it, but how was it collected in the first place? Random apps with shady privacy policies?
- prostoalex 6y ago
  There's a whole cottage industry of apps monetizing user location in bulk. They mainly position themselves as local deals apps (find the best restaurant, get a coupon from nearby store) and fitness apps (rewards for walking, running, etc.) Both use cases call for always-on location sharing.
- Sindrome 6y ago
  Once I was approached by an ad company that wanted to use geo data gathered by Candy Crush that they purchased to target people with ads on their daily commute.
Alex3917 6y ago
This (and much worse) has been happening for decades. "Don't take your cell phone" is pretty much rule #1 of going to protests. I don't even go to protests, but this is in the news all the time. E.g. the surveillance tactics the government used to break up the Dakota Access Pipeline protests was a major news story around the entire world.
- nickthegreek 6y ago
  your cell phone is your camera though, which can be a very powerful accountability tool. Is there a reason that it wouldn't be better to go into airplane mode, disable wifi and bluetooth?
  - _jal 6y ago
    Confiscation/search is still an issue. As far as the camera, the country is awash in old cell phones. If your goal is documentation (as opposed to immediate Twitter posts), it is far better than using the one with a phone number.
    - snazz 6y ago
      Have there been recorded cases of police forcing people to unlock encrypted phones of protesters in the US? I would feel pretty safe with my iPhone in airplane mode (with all the radios off).
      - _jal 6y ago
        I don't know of any cases specifically from protests. And this time most of the cop riots seemed far more focused on cracking skulls than surveillance - it seemed more about defending their egos against status attacks than more carefully planned oppression. But there have been many cases of cops forcing or attempting to force phone unlocks, and more where they coerce unlocking by lying about the law. Which is perfectly legal - the cliche about cops being being paid to lie is perfectly accurate, if not a full explication of their duties. Feelings of safety are pretty individual. Apps that access personal data of importance don't live on my phone that leaves the house.
yters 6y ago
So mostly young white males trashing black neighborhoods? Who is exploiting who again?
- mothsonasloth 6y ago
  Be careful, some of these young white middle class people trashing neighborhoods could be the next Che, Lenin or Pol Pott. Agitation is the first stage of a physical revolution. No, I'm not being hyperbolic... history repeats itself
paulcarroty 6y ago
China does it for decades. Every any kind of activist should know online privacy 101 and use burner phone/sim.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Even if the individual is privacy focused, careful with the apps on their smartphone, if the cellular service provider pimps out the telemetry there's little one could do to protect the privacy. One of the reasons to have 'Non cellular network mobile Internet'[1] via long range hotspots where we could use standard techniques we use to protect ourselves from the ISP. [1]https://needgap.com/problems/51-non-cellular-network-mobile-internet-telecom-internet https://needgap.com/problems/51-non-cellular-network-mobile-...
- centimeter 6y ago
  The best technical option here is to allow for dynamic payment for cellular services (via privacy-preserving payment protocols like Lightning) and no fixed hardware identifiers like IMEI. You just randomize your IMEI/MAC/whatever every time you connect to a new provider. Many of the challenges here are that wireless regulators outlaw such privacy-protecting measures.
  - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
    How is 'dynamic payment for cellular services' the best technical option than ditching SIM altogether for WiFi and using encrypted apps for voice calls? More over, no handset level changes or changes to govt. policy is required, user can choose to not have a cellular provider(Parent link has couple of companies doing that in India).
    - centimeter 6y ago
      Range outside of hyperdense urban centers.
      - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
        Fair enough, but any sate of the art technology first reaches the urban center especially when it's privacy focussed.
jsilence 6y ago
Could Meshtastic alleviate this?
sdenton4 6y ago
Buzzfeed uses a kinda misleading pull-quote from the analytics: "African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females". The stat this refers to is gender ratio /amongst Black protestors only/; the overall racial mix of the protests really wasn't much different from their observed daytime (ie, control) racial mix. FWIW, they also observe the same in-city out-of-city breakdown during the day and night, indicating that the 'bussed in protestor' fantasies of the right wing conspiracy machine were baseless. (though, really, that was pretty obvious anyway, and the tin-foil hats won't be convinced by any kind of evidence...)
- cbhl 6y ago
  Yeah, I was confused by this pull quote given the pie charts later on the page showing majority-caucasian (over 72% in the four cities)
soared 6y ago
Mobilewalla data 101: Mobilewalla is a next generation data company that employs big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and creativity to power the most granular consumer intelligence platform on the planet. Mobilewalla is the only consumer data provider employing time-based analysis of location and app usage. The leading provider of Nielsen-verified mobile audience insights, Mobilewalla’s cutting-edge proprietary compression algorithm enables the storage, accessing, and analysis of 80 petabytes of data. Collection methodology: Mobilewalla harnesses location and behavior-based data to understand consumers and recognize where individuals are in their life journey based on two years of historical data. User information is collected from a variety of sources so advertisers can engage consumers who are ready to buy and develop compelling advertising campaigns that speak directly to their best customers.
mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
This is going to be skewed by the fact that not all people - and certainly not all protestors - carry cell phones. It also wouldn't be terribly surprising if the rate at which they do so varies by race, income, etc.
gojomo 6y ago
While the demographics, techniques, & reaction are all interesting, there's no support in the article text for Buzzfeed's headline claim of "almost 17k protestors had no idea a tech company was tracing their location". For example, there's no survey of the involved mobile users – or even a quote from a present individual! – to ask or otherwise confirm how many had 'no idea' of such tracking. While often people are surprised at the tracking that's happened, usually as a result of 'fine print' they've clicked-through at some point, this is a young, activist & heavy-mobile-using population. Many will know or suspect tracking is happening. The more privacy-oriented organizers often inform participants of such considerations. Those affected have probably consciously enabled many kinds of 'location sharing' options & location-sensitive apps – and then specifically used those features to share updates/photos, with explicit location disclosure, from the protest site. Many may have a generationally blasé attitude about the inevitability of such tracking. Some may even be happy that "I'm being counted". There's always controversy after mass actions as to the actual number of participants, or how many truly represent a certain local community, with biased estimates from those with agendas. A possible silver-lining of technological tracking, if the potential abuse for persecuting individuals can be prevented, is that it can turn mass actions into more-accurately-measured "super-petitions", reflecting both viewpoint & intensity-of-commitment, for change.
colinprince 6y ago
"It is really just fundamentally terrifying" -from TFA. Yes, yes it is. Those handling data like this, from whatever source, need much tighter regulation, since they are unable to regulate themselves.
escape_goat 6y ago
The difference between a report and a publicity stunt is the detailed discussion of sampling and category inference methodology contained in a report.
oyra 6y ago
offtopic, but how come there are only two genders participating in these protests?! there must be something wrong with the analysis.
- dmitrygr 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system
  - oyra 6y ago
    it was a sarcasm :))
coronadisaster 6y ago
We need a non-profit company (or something) that will purchase all location data from cellphone companies, all purchase histories from credit card companies, etc and post it online for everyone to see... maybe that would wake up some people.
jordache 6y ago
as long as the data is stripped of PII. I don't care.. what's the harm?
stx 6y ago
If you live in an authoritarian country that can disappear you for protesting you should turn off your phone or use a burner phone. I am not sure if protesters in places like Hong Kong know that China could be logging BT or WIFI mac addresses and later connect that address with a real owner.
etempleton 6y ago
It gets much, much worse than this. Companies are now promoting data services to advertisers that allow a company to install a cookie on their website and, by just having a user complete a site visit, match an IP address to a physical mailing address with claimed 90% + accuracy. Don't believe me? Check out this company: https://www.eltoro.com/ https://www.eltoro.com/ One of many companies that have recently popped up offering just such a service.

369 points by psychanarch 6y ago

> Datta [Mobilewalla CEO] said Mobilewalla didn’t prepare the report for law enforcement or a public agency, but rather to satisfy its own employees' curiosity about what its vast trove of unregulated data could reveal about the demonstrators. Datta told BuzzFeed News that the company doesn’t plan to include information about whether a person attended a protest to its clients, or to law enforcement agencies. > Mobilewalla does not collect the data itself, but rather buys it from a variety of sources, including advertisers, data brokers, and internet service providers.

Blahah 6y ago
So really a whole load of different companies are tracking tons of people, and anyone can buy and aggregate the data, then query it for insights. It's good that they publicised it rather than capitalising on it.
- sukilot 6y ago
  Mobilewalla literally exists for the primary purpose of capitalizing on that data.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  They also mentioned their disapproval of riots and that they were worried about 'outside agitators', so it reads very much as if they went looking for the data to support their theory. The notion of wicked 'outside agitators' has often been thrown out by politicians who don't want to engage with an issue; it's an old trope that was used to delegitimize the civil rights movement in the 1960s by blaming it on communists or the influence of Martin Luther King. He commented on the trope explicitly in one of his Letters from Birmingham Jail: Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds. Most recently, this was heard in Georgia following the death of Rayshard Brooks, and a subsequent riot in which a Wendy's restaurant was burnt down. A cry went up about 'outside agitators' and suspicion fell on a woman pictured at the scene; it turned out she was the late Mr Brooks' girlfriend.
  - Ar-Curunir 6y ago
    The current iteration of the trope also infantilizes actual black protestors and rioters, as if only “white outsider anarchists” can lead black folks to express their anger in ways that don’t please white notions of “model minorities”
- sambull 6y ago
  If you expect a discount on your mcmuffin expect your data to be sold. That's the only reason store apps exist. To exfiltrate your data including tracking your movements.
mc32 6y ago
This almost mirrors OkCupid’s dataviz articles they’d do for publicity. The data is aggregate data. It shows mostly males, in the 18-34 age bracket, mostly white. The CEO whose surname is Datta. Quite appropos.
- sneak 6y ago
  Reminder: OKCupid is owned by Match Group (also owns Tinder, Plenty of Fish, BlackPeopleMeet, OurTime, Twoo, match.com, and others), which sells their entire profile database (unredacted(!), with full names, sexual preferences, locations, and photos) to data brokers[1]. Very few services are immune from this. I learned recently that Airbnb (YC W09) actually sells your chat logs[2] and stay history(!) to data brokers, which can be used for stalking or kidnapping in the wrong hands. Coinbase (YC S12) is also one of the companies that sells your activity log (including IP addresses and timestamps, which amounts to a location tracklog) to a third party without your explicit consent (other than creating a Coinbase account). 1: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59vbp5/shady-data-brokers-are-selling-online-dating-profiles-by-the-millions https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59vbp5/shady-data-brokers... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-score-access.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-...
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Sounds like a GDPR fine waiting to happen.
    - dreggie 6y ago
      CCPA is really focused on sellers and aggregators of personal data, and this is a perfect example of why they need regulation.
  - crobertsbmw 6y ago
    That vice article is more interesting than the OPs one.
  - sukilot 6y ago

supahfly_remix 6y ago

The reports showed ethnicity of the protestors. Is this inferred from ad preferences? Or, is there a database that keeps this?

akerro 6y ago
It's US so mobile providers, ISP very likely have such data from being voluntary provided by customers.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  Are you implying that US ISP's ask the race of their customers? I've never been asked by AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, Spectrum, or other ISPs I've used.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    I'm not in the business but I'd guess that an ISP can determine with pretty high confidence your race, ethnicity, gender, approximate age and approximate income simply by analyzing your DNS requests. And they probably have a lot more data than DNS.
    - jtbayly 6y ago
      Agreed, but I wouldn't describe that as "being voluntary provided by customers."
agakshat 6y ago
The report mentions ethnicity is inferred from browsing history, which they are also able to purchase from data brokers.
jleach82 6y ago
It comes from many different places and is cross-correlated at many levels. From credit card purchase history to social media to phone location data, across multiple agents and brokers throughout the data market. See: Data Breaches, Crisis and Opportunity (ISBN 978-0-13-450678-4)

ojnabieoot 6y ago

> “It’s hard to tell you a specific reason as to why we did this,” [Mobilewalla CEO Anindya] Datta said. “But over time, a bunch of us in the company were watching with curiosity and some degree of alarm as to what’s going on.” He defined those sources of alarm as what he called "antisocial behavior," including vandalism, looting, and actions like "breaking the glass of an Apple store.” He added that they were attempting to test if protests were being driven by outside agitators. Probably not the best defense to be made when people are concerned that this technology is being used to suppress and monitor protestors...

throwaway29639 6y ago
The people breaking glass in an Apple store are violent criminals. Peaceful protestors exercising their first amendment right to assembly should applaud the ability to remove violent members from their ranks. Your pull quote describes a company concerned about criminals. The actions they are concerned with are not constitutionally protected. Probably not the best attack to lump together rioters and protestors. And I thought all the rioters at the protests were white supremacists trying to start shit anyway; don't you want to track them?
- burkaman 6y ago
  Only speaking for myself, but no, I don't think tracking all citizens to determine which ones are white supremacists is a good idea.
  - smitty1e 6y ago
    This information is Checkov's Gun[1]. Stipulate that the current crop of businesses and customers are ethical. There are zero (0) guarantees regarding what happens in the next act. So more thought is needed about the who/what/where/when/why about collecting data. The newest and shiniest technology is not automatically optimal in the long term. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun
  - throwaway20394 6y ago

aszantu 6y ago

I remember that there was some protest survival guide, and it mentioned to either leave the smartphone at home, or bring a dumb phone w/o contract, so you can at least call an ambulance if need be.

AlphaGeekZulu 6y ago
Exactly! Never bring a smartphone to a protest and keep the dumb phone shut off, except if an emergency qualifies otherwise. There are hundreds of reasons for not bringing a smartphone, not only the abuse of companies like Mobilewalla. Imagine if you happen to be close to a storefront that is vandalized or a statue that is brought down - cellphone data will make you a terrorist suspect! (At least in the current US).
- whoopdedo 6y ago
  More specifically, this undermines the stated justification for Mobilewalla's report. Which was to determine the amount of protestors who came from outside the cities they appeared in. If I'm the operator of a protests-as-a-service company the first thing I do is make sure none of the people have a cell phone that can be used to trace them back to me. But that was the stated justification. The real purpose of the report is to advertise what Mobilewalla does. I consider this a form of profiteering.
  - sukilot 6y ago
    If you assume that everyone has perfect Opsec, then there is now need for law enforcement at all, because all crime would be undetectable.
aesh2Xa1 6y ago
Why would you need to hide having participated in a protest? It is an act which is protected by the First Amendment in the US Constitution.
- sukilot 6y ago

zucker42 6y ago

Does anyone know more specifically how a company like Mobilewalla gets location data? Is it from Google, or from apps people open on their phone, or from trackers on websites, or from cell data, or from something else? Also, is there any way to prevent Google from tracking the location of my Android phone short of uninstalling Android?

jleach82 6y ago
The data is all over. It goes through brokers and agents and multiple companies that perform various aggregations and shapings... Data Breaches, Crisis and Opportunity (ISBN 978-0-13-450678-4)
julesallen 6y ago
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/14/how-to-turn-off-google-location-tracking https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/14/how-to-tu... Basically use somebody else's maps, at the extreme end you can opt out of find my phone, and just don't manually use any Google services at all.
agakshat 6y ago
Very often, it’s the phone networks which are selling our location data to these brokers. There is virtually no regulation on this, and for phone companies it’s basically free money.
- zucker42 6y ago
  Does the ethnicity data also come from phone companies?
  - agakshat 6y ago
    I hope not, but I expect that with a few days of browsing history it’s trivial to predict ethnicity.
  - rhizome 6y ago
    Probably easier to get it via match.com and their subsidiaries.

ogre_codes 6y ago

It seems like it would be very difficult to distinguish which side of the police line someone is on based on a pile of demographics. How many of those are protestors versus police? Likewise, National Guard, reporters, fire department, medical, etc. If they separated them out, it doesn't say they did in the article or even hint at an attempt.

jleach82 6y ago
I don't think so. Read this: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-help... I am fairly confident they can easily tell which way someone leans on the matter.
sukilot 6y ago
Government workers are a tiny fraction of population at a protest.

jleach82 6y ago

Data Breaches, Crisis and Opportunity (ISBN 978-0-13-450678-4) I always "knew" that mass data is evaluated for many things, but I had no idea how much I didn't know. That book - besides being an excellent reference for anyone responsible for protecting data - is unsettling in showing the depth of the market and how it works. The topic headline doesn't even scratch the surface.

rydre 6y ago

[deleted]

jleach82 6y ago
Part of the problem is that this type of data collection and market environment evolves much more quickly than legislation can ever keep up. They're trying, but..
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Data collection existed in the US, and probably most major markets, a century ago, it's just that then it was primarily keyed on mailing address instead of telephone number. Legislators are never going to do anything about it unless absolutely forced to, because they rely on targeted campaigns themselves. (and if you're in the US, it gets worse. When I lived in California, I asked my letter carrier if I could put a "no junk mail please" sign on the box like we do here. I was told to please not call it junk mail, but "bulk mail", as it provides a significant fraction of their funding.) Anyone up for a game of 35 questions? Edit: https://www.msp-pgh.com/history-direct-mail-marketing/ https://www.msp-pgh.com/history-direct-mail-marketing/ > The American Anti-Slavery Society printed and mailed marketing materials to religious and civic leaders in the south in 1835. This is likely the first direct mail campaign. They created a mailing list from names in newspapers and city directories, among other public lists. the poorly-targeted campaign was not well-received: https://postalmuseum.si.edu/node/1912 https://postalmuseum.si.edu/node/1912

mc32 6y ago

>” If [this data] ends up in hands of the government, or if protesters are concerned that it could end up in the hands of the government, that may suppress speech, it may deter people from going to protests,” Hussain said.” At this point I don’t think it’s government so much as private companies I’m concerned about. Candidates silently get ignored depending on what this kind of data shows.

shadowgovt 6y ago

That's definitely going to continue to be a thing. New technology adds new ways to protest and counter-protest. Cell phones have brought us mass-tracking and flash-mobs.

dubcanada 6y ago

Not to wear a tinfoil hat, but couldn't this data be entirely made up? It also seems to imply that the data is 100% accurate. And that is also wrong based on what I see.

sukilot 6y ago
Sure. Any researcher could be lying.

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

Between the article and the orig report, I found the data presented in a confusing way. > "African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females" Then follows pie charts showing Caucasians outnumbered African-Americans 6:1. It looks like what they meant was 'among African-American protesters, the majority were male'.

mc32 6y ago
Yes that’s what they meant. It is really poorly worded. They could have used a copy editor to check that. That said it looks like males dominated most of the charts in most cities cited.
gus_massa 6y ago
The square with the color in the legend is very small, so it's very difficult to understand what the pies represent. (I don't understand how they choose the colors.)

fmakunbound 6y ago

How do these ass-clowns get stuff like mobile application I'm using https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4309344/Mobilewalla%20Data%20Dictionary%20(1)%20(1).pdf https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4309344/Mobilewalla%20Data%20... https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4309344/Content%20Offers/Mobilewalla%20Data%20Dictionary_Aggregated_FEB2020.pdf https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/4309344/Content%20Offers/Mobi... and even location data https://www.mobilewalla.com/places-of-interest-data-schema https://www.mobilewalla.com/places-of-interest-data-schema Do carriers ship some kind of Mobilewalla telemetry app on the phone people use?

jmatthews 6y ago
Having done some work in this space I can tell you the exact process. Applications on your phone provide a maid. Mobile Application ID. Which reports back it's(the phones) geo location. Using some basic statistics regarding location, duration of stay, time of day, you infer home address, work address. Once you have a small foothold you go to aggregated data repositories and run a query. Once you get a positive hit the rest is dead simple.
- kjaftaedi 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, are you able to provide any examples of these aggregated data repositories?
  - soared 6y ago
    Data management platform 'dmp' is the software where these segments are stored and used in advertising. ie http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/data-directory-2810741.pdf http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/cloud/data-directory-2810...
- mtgp1000 6y ago
  I had been paranoid about this for some time, thanks for confirming. It is so trivially easy to decipher a person's life from their location data, especially with some simple ML. The fact that it's so easy ensures in my mind that it's only a matter of time before this data falls into the hands of a true authoritarian administration.

Vervious 6y ago

I'm confused why hacker news thinks collecting demographic data is a bad thing, and is all about regulating it... when everyone's personal website has google analytics installed and is doing the exact same thing. Yet we don't bat an eye at it.

Vervious 6y ago
Seriously though, doesn't it strike any of you as absolutely hypocritical? We're attacking data collection in public spaces in real life, while defending it in our own domain (virtual life). I know that a lot of tech industry paychecks come from monetizing people's data...
- zucker42 6y ago
  It's quite possibly different people arguing either side.
- jacobr1 6y ago
  Part of the difference is scope and purpose. I'm ok with Amazon using my purchase, and product viewing data, to recommend products I might like to purchase. I'm even ok with them using aggregated data to determine where to invest in white-labled products, fix UX issues, or find fraud rings. What I'm not ok with, is them selling my data, combining it with cellphone data, netflix viewing data, creditcard data, magazine subscriptions, email subscriptions, and many others, and building personal profiles that governments, political organizations, and commercial enterprises I don't have a direct relationship with to abuse. I don't think it is a slippery-slope from from the more narrow, single-firm use case to the broad-profile-being abused. GDPR and similar regulation is one way we can get there. We are going to need probably another generation of people and laws to figure out the right regulatory norms and frameworks, but it seems like a tractable problem.
  - soared 6y ago
    Amazon doesn't sell your data. You can't have a legitimate discussion about this on HN because no one does their research and so just make outrageously incorrect claims like that. Netflix, apple, etc don't sell data. There is no such thing as building a 'personal profile' by combining data from all these different sources. Data is licensed in aggregate, and typically anything under 1,000 user ids can't be used. Unless your bringing in data yourself, you can't build profiles on individuals. I 100% agree that we need major privacy regulation, but the first step in that is putting in effort to actually understand and discuss the facts.

kome 6y ago

btw, it is common (in france) for the police to use "scanners" to grab all the phone numbers of protesters.

anigbrowl 6y ago
Also here - read up on 'IMSI catchers'.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

austincheney 6y ago

I wonder if that data can be correlated against recent Covid spikes. The cities in Texas showing the most dramatic rise in diagnosis are also those that experienced the largest quantities of protests delayed exactly the same amount of time as the incubation period.

DailyHN 6y ago
That doesn't explain Florida. The biggest days of protests nationwide were rained out in FL.
danso 6y ago
That wouldn't explain the flat rates in NYC [0] or Minneapolis and St. Paul (Hennepin/Ramsey County) [1] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronavirus-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/new-york-coronav... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/minnesota-coronavirus-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/minnesota-corona... edit: Also, Texas had a Phase 3 reopening on June 3, which is around the time of peak protest: https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-announces-phase-iii-to-open-texas https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-announces-ph...
- dehrmann 6y ago
  A few weeks ago, I remember Cuomo patting himself and New Yorkers on the back for continuing to see a decline in cases. It's a lot easier to do that when 20% of NYC residents have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, and that was in May. I'm sure this limited spread during protests somewhat in NYC. That said, social distancing during protests, being outdoors, how many people had active infections (this varies wildly across the US), mask use, actions (positive and negative) by the police, and living situations of the protesters (alone in an apartment or four roommates) all have an effect.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    Only in the presence of social distancing or other countermeasures. 20% antibodies means that you could have an R = 1.25 and still get an effective R < 1.0, preventing further onwards transmission. R0 estimates for COVID-19 ranged from 2.5-6, so by itself 20% of the population with antibodies wouldn't do anything (it'd reduce R to 2-4.8, which is still pretty quick exponential spread, faster than the flu). However, R in the U.S. around the time of the protests was measured at about 1.07, because it wasn't fully opened up yet and many people are staying home out of fear. Under those conditions NYC gets an effective R = 0.85 (epidemic dies out), while a state with 2% antibodies has an effective R = 1.05, which is still positive (albeit slow) exponential spread. I suspect it's a combination of the lax social distancing requirements + lack of immunity. NYC would still be experiencing exponential spread without existing immunity, but it's only because they're still locked down that the level of immunity they have can prevent an epidemic.

truculent 6y ago

> Mobilewalla does not collect the data itself, but rather buys it from a variety of sources, including advertisers, data brokers, and internet service providers. So we can mobilise to use this data for profiling protestors, but not to help tackle a pandemic which is spreading concurrently?

thatlongthrow1 6y ago
They don't get the fine detailed data that is needed for contact tracing.
nodelessness 6y ago
We cant we just dont care to.
soared 6y ago
This data has an accuracy of something like ~80ft on average. https://www.mobilemarketer.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/research/22928.html#:~:text=Author&text=While%20mobile%20location%20data%20is,%2C%20potentially%20impacting%20marketers'%20programs https://www.mobilemarketer.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/re....
- truculent 6y ago
  Ah, right - less than I thought. I suppose that could be useful for mass-gatherings but generally we should not have those anyway. Thank you for the correction

sitkack 6y ago

Much of this data comes from a company called https://www.airsage.com/ https://www.airsage.com/ The anonymization is a joke, they had fixed IDs over I think a 30 day window. Airsage should be shut down and C-levels to the board should be jailed for wire tapping.

tzs 6y ago

It gives what percentage of the protestors were black in each city, 18% in Atlanta, 3% in Los Angeles, 11% in Minneapolis, and 14% in New York City. In all of those cities that's lower than the percentage of black people in the general population, so black people were underrepresented. But they were much more underrepresented in Los Angeles and Atlanta than in Minneapolis or New York. Here's a table. First column is percent among protestors. Second is percent among general population. Third is first column as a percent of second column. 18 52 35 Atlanta 3 11 27 Los Angeles 11 19 58 Minneapolis 14 24 58 New York City I.e., in New York and Minneapolis you had close to 60% as many black people as you would have expected if you just went by city demographics. In Atlanta it was only 35% and only 27% in Los Angeles. I wonder if there is some factor, especially in Los Angeles and Atlanta, that discouraged black people from wanting to attend or some hardship to attending that disproportionately fell on black people?

bzb3 6y ago
Or maybe they simply didn't agree with the premise of the protests.
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  Of the people I've talked to in real life, most don't, so these numbers are not too surprising to me.
brobdingnagians 6y ago
Someone interviewed white people in New York about abolishing police and lots of them whole-heartedly agreed. They interviewed black people in New York about it, and they said it was insane to want to do that. That would fit these statistics.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  It wouldn't explain the wide statistical variation between cities.
- DanHulton 6y ago

loraa 6y ago

It's beautiful how people get the latest and greatest smart phone, never read the manual, turn on all the features and keeps all setting at default, eats out of Google or apples ass, and then complain that their privacy has been violated? Really?

one2know 6y ago

If you have been watching live streams, you will learn many protesters don't understand what a "live stream" is, because the streamer tries to explain it to them and they still think it is a recording that can be deleted.

not2b 6y ago
But while it initially goes out live, after the live stream ends the video becomes a recording, which can be deleted.
- one2know 6y ago
  On one stream I watched, the streamer tells a protester they are live streaming. The protester literally says, "I don't know what that is." And actually recordings can't be deleted because viewers are recording the live stream and have their own copies instantly which they upload to twitter or youtube.
- QuercusMax 6y ago
  Unless someone saves that stream.

andai 6y ago

How was this data collected? They bought it, but how was it collected in the first place? Random apps with shady privacy policies?

prostoalex 6y ago
There's a whole cottage industry of apps monetizing user location in bulk. They mainly position themselves as local deals apps (find the best restaurant, get a coupon from nearby store) and fitness apps (rewards for walking, running, etc.) Both use cases call for always-on location sharing.
Sindrome 6y ago
Once I was approached by an ad company that wanted to use geo data gathered by Candy Crush that they purchased to target people with ads on their daily commute.

Alex3917 6y ago

This (and much worse) has been happening for decades. "Don't take your cell phone" is pretty much rule #1 of going to protests. I don't even go to protests, but this is in the news all the time. E.g. the surveillance tactics the government used to break up the Dakota Access Pipeline protests was a major news story around the entire world.

nickthegreek 6y ago
your cell phone is your camera though, which can be a very powerful accountability tool. Is there a reason that it wouldn't be better to go into airplane mode, disable wifi and bluetooth?
- _jal 6y ago
  Confiscation/search is still an issue. As far as the camera, the country is awash in old cell phones. If your goal is documentation (as opposed to immediate Twitter posts), it is far better than using the one with a phone number.
  - snazz 6y ago
    Have there been recorded cases of police forcing people to unlock encrypted phones of protesters in the US? I would feel pretty safe with my iPhone in airplane mode (with all the radios off).
    - _jal 6y ago
      I don't know of any cases specifically from protests. And this time most of the cop riots seemed far more focused on cracking skulls than surveillance - it seemed more about defending their egos against status attacks than more carefully planned oppression. But there have been many cases of cops forcing or attempting to force phone unlocks, and more where they coerce unlocking by lying about the law. Which is perfectly legal - the cliche about cops being being paid to lie is perfectly accurate, if not a full explication of their duties. Feelings of safety are pretty individual. Apps that access personal data of importance don't live on my phone that leaves the house.

yters 6y ago

So mostly young white males trashing black neighborhoods? Who is exploiting who again?

mothsonasloth 6y ago
Be careful, some of these young white middle class people trashing neighborhoods could be the next Che, Lenin or Pol Pott. Agitation is the first stage of a physical revolution. No, I'm not being hyperbolic... history repeats itself

paulcarroty 6y ago

China does it for decades. Every any kind of activist should know online privacy 101 and use burner phone/sim.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

Even if the individual is privacy focused, careful with the apps on their smartphone, if the cellular service provider pimps out the telemetry there's little one could do to protect the privacy. One of the reasons to have 'Non cellular network mobile Internet'[1] via long range hotspots where we could use standard techniques we use to protect ourselves from the ISP. [1]https://needgap.com/problems/51-non-cellular-network-mobile-internet-telecom-internet https://needgap.com/problems/51-non-cellular-network-mobile-...

centimeter 6y ago
The best technical option here is to allow for dynamic payment for cellular services (via privacy-preserving payment protocols like Lightning) and no fixed hardware identifiers like IMEI. You just randomize your IMEI/MAC/whatever every time you connect to a new provider. Many of the challenges here are that wireless regulators outlaw such privacy-protecting measures.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  How is 'dynamic payment for cellular services' the best technical option than ditching SIM altogether for WiFi and using encrypted apps for voice calls? More over, no handset level changes or changes to govt. policy is required, user can choose to not have a cellular provider(Parent link has couple of companies doing that in India).
  - centimeter 6y ago
    Range outside of hyperdense urban centers.
    - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
      Fair enough, but any sate of the art technology first reaches the urban center especially when it's privacy focussed.

jsilence 6y ago

Could Meshtastic alleviate this?

sdenton4 6y ago

Buzzfeed uses a kinda misleading pull-quote from the analytics: "African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females". The stat this refers to is gender ratio /amongst Black protestors only/; the overall racial mix of the protests really wasn't much different from their observed daytime (ie, control) racial mix. FWIW, they also observe the same in-city out-of-city breakdown during the day and night, indicating that the 'bussed in protestor' fantasies of the right wing conspiracy machine were baseless. (though, really, that was pretty obvious anyway, and the tin-foil hats won't be convinced by any kind of evidence...)

cbhl 6y ago
Yeah, I was confused by this pull quote given the pie charts later on the page showing majority-caucasian (over 72% in the four cities)

soared 6y ago

Mobilewalla data 101: Mobilewalla is a next generation data company that employs big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and creativity to power the most granular consumer intelligence platform on the planet. Mobilewalla is the only consumer data provider employing time-based analysis of location and app usage. The leading provider of Nielsen-verified mobile audience insights, Mobilewalla’s cutting-edge proprietary compression algorithm enables the storage, accessing, and analysis of 80 petabytes of data. Collection methodology: Mobilewalla harnesses location and behavior-based data to understand consumers and recognize where individuals are in their life journey based on two years of historical data. User information is collected from a variety of sources so advertisers can engage consumers who are ready to buy and develop compelling advertising campaigns that speak directly to their best customers.

mandelbrotwurst 6y ago

This is going to be skewed by the fact that not all people - and certainly not all protestors - carry cell phones. It also wouldn't be terribly surprising if the rate at which they do so varies by race, income, etc.

gojomo 6y ago

While the demographics, techniques, & reaction are all interesting, there's no support in the article text for Buzzfeed's headline claim of "almost 17k protestors had no idea a tech company was tracing their location". For example, there's no survey of the involved mobile users – or even a quote from a present individual! – to ask or otherwise confirm how many had 'no idea' of such tracking. While often people are surprised at the tracking that's happened, usually as a result of 'fine print' they've clicked-through at some point, this is a young, activist & heavy-mobile-using population. Many will know or suspect tracking is happening. The more privacy-oriented organizers often inform participants of such considerations. Those affected have probably consciously enabled many kinds of 'location sharing' options & location-sensitive apps – and then specifically used those features to share updates/photos, with explicit location disclosure, from the protest site. Many may have a generationally blasé attitude about the inevitability of such tracking. Some may even be happy that "I'm being counted". There's always controversy after mass actions as to the actual number of participants, or how many truly represent a certain local community, with biased estimates from those with agendas. A possible silver-lining of technological tracking, if the potential abuse for persecuting individuals can be prevented, is that it can turn mass actions into more-accurately-measured "super-petitions", reflecting both viewpoint & intensity-of-commitment, for change.

colinprince 6y ago

"It is really just fundamentally terrifying" -from TFA. Yes, yes it is. Those handling data like this, from whatever source, need much tighter regulation, since they are unable to regulate themselves.

escape_goat 6y ago

The difference between a report and a publicity stunt is the detailed discussion of sampling and category inference methodology contained in a report.

oyra 6y ago

offtopic, but how come there are only two genders participating in these protests?! there must be something wrong with the analysis.

dmitrygr 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_sex-determination_system
- oyra 6y ago
  it was a sarcasm :))

coronadisaster 6y ago

We need a non-profit company (or something) that will purchase all location data from cellphone companies, all purchase histories from credit card companies, etc and post it online for everyone to see... maybe that would wake up some people.

jordache 6y ago

as long as the data is stripped of PII. I don't care.. what's the harm?

stx 6y ago

If you live in an authoritarian country that can disappear you for protesting you should turn off your phone or use a burner phone. I am not sure if protesters in places like Hong Kong know that China could be logging BT or WIFI mac addresses and later connect that address with a real owner.

etempleton 6y ago

It gets much, much worse than this. Companies are now promoting data services to advertisers that allow a company to install a cookie on their website and, by just having a user complete a site visit, match an IP address to a physical mailing address with claimed 90% + accuracy. Don't believe me? Check out this company: https://www.eltoro.com/ https://www.eltoro.com/ One of many companies that have recently popped up offering just such a service.