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.
Complementics and Predicio sent my personal data to Gravy Analytics, a major data broker in the marketing business. This is according to the SAR from Gravy. Gravy did not respond to comment.
Venntel is a subsidiary of Gravy Analytics. Venntel has a lot of government contracts – CBP, ICE, IRS, FBI, DEA. What these agencies actually use the data for @ByronTau (WSJ) and @josephfcox (Motherboard) have a lot of good reporting on.
Venntel told me in a subject access request that my data was shared, but they did not provide to whom. When contacted later - they told me in a short statement that the data was not shared with ICE or CBP.
ENGLISH ARTICLE: https://t.co/PQOLHq5W1A
We cooperated with @josephfcox, who made this article with a US focus https://t.co/f4NSDckqao
In the article you will find statements from U.S. agencies and apps / companies.
Reaction to the reporting by @josephfcox https://t.co/qbwp42NY9v

More from United states

You May Also Like

I hate when I learn something new (to me) & stunning about the Jeff Epstein network (h/t MoodyKnowsNada.)

Where to begin?

So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was "longtime lawyer and confidant of...Robert Maxwell," Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad.


"Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991."
https://t.co/DAEgchNyTP


OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg

Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a

Oh that's right.

The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.

Donald Barr was also quite a


I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."

Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.