My Phone Was Spying on Me, so I Tracked Down the Surveillants

THREAD on the location data industry and how European personal data ended up at a U.S. government contractor.

There are 160 apps on my phone. What they’re actually doing, I don’t know. So I decided to figure it out by using the power of the GDPR - or the more lame name of subject access requests (SAR).

Long story short – I got a lot of data on my movements. Actually more than 75.000 data points on my precise location.

Home and work:

How: I designed an experiment where I installed a lot of apps on an Android phone. I then consented to sharing my location data. Then I turned the tables: By using SARs I stitch together the data flows from me to different companies. (Better graphics in article.)

The app Funny Weather appeared in the metadata provided by Venntel and Gravy Analytics. The data might have been shared through Predicio, but the company did not respond to any requests for an interview.