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“We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than

• philjohn 4y ago
  It's most likely that the Telco Director was lying out of his posterior, trying to scare Twitter into doing what they wanted with vague threats of "your competitor will get this money otherwise". It's called a bluff.
• rkagerer 4y ago
  Some context for those who skipped the article: The major telco said other tech companies regularly collect and sell them this type of granular data harvested from users' phones.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Maybe they were getting this from some ad networks like Taboola or Outbrain - but then those networks don't usually have enough info to really identify you. Sure, if they were giving your IP to a telCo who can map your IP to a name if you're a customer - that's identifying you. It's HIGHLY unlikely this happened at the usual suspects (FAANG).
    • DaveMebs 4y ago
      You think it is highly unlikely that Facebook/Meta is selling granular user data?
      • jsnell 4y ago
        Yes, it's incredibly unlikely. So unlikely that it's basically impossible. They explicitly and unambiguously deny doing it; if that was incorrect, there would be a huge regulatory and public backlash. (Think of what happened with the Cambridge Analytica case, despite Facebook's hands being pretty clean on that). No disgruntled ex-employees blew the whistle on this but did on other issue), which suggests it probably didn't happen. Selling ads is very profitable. Selling data directly risks that business for little gain. In addition to the backlash when that data selling were revealed, it risks somebody else using the data sold by Meta to outcompete them on ad targeting.
        • SantalBlush 4y ago
          >They explicitly and unambiguously deny doing it; if that was incorrect, there would be a huge regulatory and public backlash. Companies typically don't admit to the public when they're engaged in unethical practices. Purdue Pharma is a good example.
          • jsnell 4y ago
            Then you say nothing on the subject, or say something that's technically true but ambiguous and easy to misunderstand.
        • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
          > it risks somebody else using the data sold by Meta to outcompete them on ad targeting Bingo. They're unlikely to be selling the data because those data are their secret sauce. They are as economically incentivized to build sociopathic models on you as they are to keep your data out of anyone else's hands.
      • hahaxdxd123 4y ago
        Even economically, it seems unlikely they would. The data is their moat and it's what they can use to target people with ads. Selling it seems counterproductive.
    • dillondoyle 4y ago
      It was probably adtech companies. There are a bunch who basically pay apps to use their api and then take the data. Apple was right to kill that imho. IIRC that was foursquare's pivot There is also lot/lon in programmatic bid requests, but I don't think they're super accurate or granular and lots of fraud. (could be wrong, just from my small experience buy side using DSPs seeing lots of lat/lons being smack in the middle of a city) [1] https://www.safegraph.com/guides/mobile-location-data-providers https://www.safegraph.com/guides/mobile-location-data-provid... [2] https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/geotargeting https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/geotarge... [3] https://fixad.tech/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/3-bid-request-examples.pdf https://fixad.tech/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/3-bid-request-...
  • emmelaich 4y ago
    Many free wifi places will track and report movements with the wifi area. Using bluetooth in addition. Shopping malls in particular can use this to find where people congregate. Can probably be related to email addresses too, and hence shared with every other mall with same ownership as well as the company that provides the free wifi. e.g. Aruba, Meraki, ...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• anfilt 4y ago
  Agreed!
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > We get a lot more than that from other tech companies. Have any journalists and/or leakers exposed exactly what these tech companies are sharing? As much as I've heard about data collection and sharing by big tech, I feel like I don't see much in the way of samples or example data. Even the forced GDPR data releases I've seen haven't been extraordinarily in-depth. Surely there must be some articles out there that I'm missing?
  • sroussey 4y ago
    It’s data brokers they are talking about.
  • dmitriid 4y ago
    > Have any journalists and/or leakers exposed exactly what these tech companies are sharing? I think that the answer to this is "yes, multiple times, often multiple times on the same companies up and down every level of the stack". And some of the companies brag about their abilities. There was some surveillance company which was showing how Covid spread after spring break in Florida by gleefully posting screenshots from their tool that tracks individual phone locations.
    • PragmaticPulp 4y ago
      > I think that the answer to this is "yes, multiple times, often multiple times on the same companies up and down every level of the stack". Do you have a link? It's always sort of discussed as if everyone knows exactly what's happening, but I'm specifically looking for links that break it down.
  • brigade 4y ago
    Sure: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/loca... It's simple - an app asks for background location permissions, then uploads all the datapoints and timestamps the OS gives them to their servers, which is then resold with "anonymization" that just replaces any personal information with an impersonal unique identifier. That's the reason Apple/Google have clamped down so hard on location permissions since then. But even a degraded dataset is still valuable - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/fog-revealed-guided-tour-how-cops-can-browse-your-location-data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/fog-revealed-guided-to...
• jrochkind1 4y ago
  You think it's true taht they get a lot more than that from "other tech companies"? (who is that? Facebook? Tik-tok?) (As an aside, it seems cute that the guy thinks the change in ownership somehow makes it "safer" for him to share inside details, but I'm glad he did)
  • modriano 4y ago
    I assume most free weather app companies make money nearly exclusively by selling user location data.
  • ericbarrett 4y ago
    Your (U.S.A.) cell network provider sells your location. No need for apps!
    • jrochkind1 4y ago
      In this case wasn't it was a cell network provider wanting the info from twitter? why'd they want it if they already have it?
      • jagged-chisel 4y ago
        Probably to correlate Twitter user names with telco customers.
        • HWR_14 4y ago
          Oh, wow. I didn't even think the request included Twitter handles.
      • shiftpgdn 4y ago
        They (the telcos) only have stats on their customers. Twitter has it for anyone running twitter. Further, twitters location data is likely more accurate than the telco due to positioning from stuff like wifi names, local gps, etc.
  • 4y ago
• languageserver 4y ago
  I do not trust this story. Seems way too absurd to happen in the 2010's. Literally just some guy (tm) on Twitter saying it
  • jabyess 4y ago
    which part seems unbelievable to you?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Healthy dose of mistrust is warranted. Still, would it really shock if it were true? In my eyes, it would only confirm what I already know.
  • scarface74 4y ago
    Why wouldn’t you believe this was happening? Facebook bought a VPN provider with the explicit purpose of spying on its users and both Facebook and Google convinced users to use what was suppose to be an internal Enterprise Certificate to track users until Apple threaten to cancel the certificate. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-unblocks-googles-internal-apps-on-ios-devices-report-says/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-unblocks-googl... But Twitter had been tracking apps installed on a users iPhone until Apple restricted access to the API that they used. https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/twitter-is-now-tracking-the-apps-you-download/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/twitter-is-now-tracking-the... The purpose of the API was for one app to send messages to another app. But it could be used to tell if an app was installed.
  • itronitron 4y ago
    2015 to be precise, which is fairly late in the game. I was at a conference a few years prior to that and some guy was bragging about all the stuff they can find out about people based on their data this and data that. There is some obsession amongst a subset of techies with knowing everything, and that extends to the daily minutiae of the lives of others.
  • 4y ago
• kkfx 4y ago
  I suggest you to think a bit about the context: - the location logs would be collected by a simple application, witch imply the phone/phone OS itself can do that; - they do refuse, Legal teams do not, but nothing state they can't satisfy the request TECHNICALLY. In other words when people tend to disagree with my consideration of smartphone as macro-spy devices bought and kept up by those who get spied as opposite of classic spying gears should think about not only that, but what they do with their (well, not really their, since they are just formal but powerless owners) phones, things like pay taxes, act on their banks accounts, pre-heat/cool their cars etc. Because such activities have a FAR bigger impact than mere position logs.
• colinmhayes 4y ago
  What I'm confused by is why the telco needs twitter to get that info. I work for a data warehousing/sql consultancy and our biggest client is telco's who have to track everyone in order to comply with subpoenas. They already have all the data about where every one of their users has been.
  • chrononaut 4y ago
    > our biggest client is telco's who have to track everyone in order to comply with subpoenas. Perhaps I am missing something, but I don't understand the intersection of why telco's are involved in serving subpoenas and the need to know the physical location of users. Are you referring to a log of networks / DHCP leases their customers were using at any given time?
    • colinmhayes 4y ago
      Not serving subpoenas, responding to them. Police subpoena stuff like "everyone who was within x feet of this phone number or location between these times" and the telcos can't just say "we don't keep that data."
      • DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
        …why not? Is there a federal law compelling then to record and store precise location data indefinitely?
        • colinmhayes 4y ago
          I'm not sure if it's a legal requirement or they just don't want to upset law enforcement. I guess maybe they're just keeping the data for other reasons and then law enforcement is jumping on that. All I know is they're using our data warehouse and having me write queries that answer those subpoenas when they come in. Well I know that in the UK it is a legal requirement, but not sure about the US.
      • novok 4y ago
• qbasic_forever 4y ago
  This is why I never use native apps on my phone. The experience sucks but I muddle through using the web for reading Twitter, reddit, etc. I am constantly, constantly bombarded with "this looks better in the app! please just run our app!!" as I browse. Still I refuse--with the web I at least know they can't harvest information about everything I'm doing. There are still some privacy concerns of course but it's much better to have the web as a firewall of sorts.
  • swagasaurus-rex 4y ago
    It's gross because that's exactly why they ask you to install. "This looks better in the app" because they sabotage the web experience so they can do this very thing.
  • subsubzero 4y ago
    same, my Wife who has 2-3 dozen apps is asking me why do you not use apps?(I have <10 apps on my phone) and I said I do not trust my data for one second with alot of these unscrupulous apps. I have a strong bias towards privacy - caveat emptor.
  • samwillis 4y ago
    Twitter and (old)reddit are better as mobile websites in every way. We have 30 years of browser UX development, culminating in tabs and multitasking tools that allow you to open things to read later, wait while they load on a slow connection or form a queue of things to read. Mobile apps for every social media site loose all of that. They are worse than useless. There is this internal fear at social media companies, they want to prevent their users leaving their little walled garden. That or the religious drive for managers to reach target metrics creates a net negative feedback loop for user satisfaction. Social media apps have no multitasking features (at least last time I used them). It's absurd. I've only used the twitter mobile website for the last three years. Will never install the app again. (Aside: my (ridiculous) conspiracy theory is that React Native is an attempt to distract developers from the advantages of a WebView based app development process that would eventually lead to the success of PWAs, locking devs into the app stores as a distribution channel)
• bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect other tech companies were claiming that they would have this granularity eventually but never actually delivered. One of the things that happens at these (and the fact that he didn't "hear this" until on site) is that Sales promises everything with a flashy powerpoint, and then what is actually delivered is a "if someone tweets in the Verizon store and uses Verizon in the tweet, you can put an ad on that".
  • aorloff 4y ago
    No, there are dozens of companies that have this data.
    • hahaxdxd123 4y ago
      Can you cite?
• bewaretheirs 4y ago
  I would have thought that a mobile telco could generate this data already just from what they need to route data (and voice calls) to each phone, at least to a somewhat coarse level, without needing to have apps upload this.
  • sp332 4y ago
    Yeah but they actually got in trouble for selling that so many times they have backed off. https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/02/us_carriers_fcc_data_report/?td=keepreading https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/02/us_carriers_fcc_data_...
  • jtbayly 4y ago
    Yeah, they have to be able to. Something about this story just doesn't add up unless this is explained.
    • f2000 4y ago
      They were after data for other carriers and/or more enriched data than they could easily collect. They could use this data for their own marketing and/or network planning. e.g. “We have the least share in market M where some significant proportion of all cellular users , based on twitter data, love NASCAR and spend relatively a lot of time on their phones at racetracks and Walmart. Lets increase capex around race tracks, do a promo with NASCAR and Walmart, and buy some appropriate ads.”
• hayst4ck 4y ago
  What angers me the most about this, is this type of topic is exactly what should be taught in a required class on ethics for engineering degrees, but is completely missing.
  • nonrandomstring 4y ago
    Yes it should be semester 1 in every single CS and SE course. Sadly, there are very few resources; textbooks and professors qualified in software engineering and ethics, and the adjacent political, social and economic realms to fill this. I'm really, honestly doing my best with this problem. The subject area is massive. The issues are horrendously complex. The targets keep moving (each day we seem to set a new bar for what shitfuckery is acceptable). Also writing a book on Ethics For Hackers that is not prescriptive or too personal value-laden is extraordinarily hard (and it makes it worse that I am an opinionated bastard) HN remains one of my best resources for "pragmatic" ethics, and so I thank you all.
    • thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > Also writing a book on Ethics For Hackers that is not prescriptive or too personal value-laden is extraordinarily hard Ethics and personal values are the same thing. It would be impossible to write a book on Ethics for [any audience] that didn't consist entirely of personal values. Similarly, since ethics are necessarily subjective, it is impossible to write about ethics in a non-prescriptive way.
      • nonrandomstring 4y ago
        There's actually an entire chapter on that subject; the difference between morals, ethics, norms, laws and best practices, throughout history and in "post-modern relativist" times. You'll either love it or hate it, depending on how open your mind is.
        • thaumasiotes 4y ago
          > the difference between morals, ethics That one's especially easy. They are exactly the same thing; mos is the Latin word, and ethos is the Greek one.
• jsnell 4y ago
  Even if we assume that the OP is telling exactly what happened rather than exaggerating (stories do tend to grow in the telling over 8 years), we don't actually know that this alleged data selling happened. All he knows is that somebody at a telco with an interest in getting Twitter's data claimed that the telco got more data from other companies. What other companies? No details. What data? No details. Was the guy from the telco telling the truth, or lying since that furthered their agenda? We have no way of judging that, and neither did the OP. Spamming this submission with that hook (rather than the parts that the OP had actual direct knowledge of) is basically just spreading misinformation.
  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
    It's also, at best, a claim made by a (presumably non-technical) employee of one of these Big Tech companies' clients. It's entirely possible that they were able to benefit from the data that Google, Facebook, whatever collects while not having direct access to it in any form.
• 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  Name and shame them.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• legohead 4y ago
  He could have been bluffing with that statement. If he already gets it, what does he need twitter for?
• rbetts 4y ago
  It's hearsay said by an antagonist during a negotiation. This quote isn't by itself trustworthy enough to be news.
• tablespoon 4y ago
  > “We should know when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day. Anything less is useless. We get a lot more than that from other tech companies.” > This should be posted absolutely everywhere with this as the hook. This type of request and the admittance that companies give even more than that all the time is headline news worthy. It's pretty well know, but it should be even more well known. IIRC, what's left of foursquare basically does that, lots of "free" apps do it (like weather, calculators, flashlights, etc.). It's the whole reason the "only allow location access when using the app," was invented.
• YeBanKo 4y ago
  Sale of data should be opt-in, not opt-out. Companies will find a way to go around this and we’ll have to catch up again, but it would be a good next step.
• FrontierPsych 4y ago
  Carry your mobile phone in a faraday cage/bag. https://www.amazon.com/faraday-bag/s?k=faraday+bag https://www.amazon.com/faraday-bag/s?k=faraday+bag