Never leave the house

If you do, they'll know.

Like many consumers, Ms. Magrin knew that apps could track people’s movements. But as smartphones have become ubiquitous and technology more accurate, an industry of snooping on people’s daily habits has spread and grown more intrusive.

At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times — a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company — reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day.

The lady the Times uses as its example at the top of this story really gets around.  If they were looking at me they'd see a billion one mile trips to work and back every day with the occasional detour to Rouses.  I've aged into becoming one of these New Orleans weirdos who never leaves the neighborhood anymore. The algorithm that tracks me can be programmed on an abacus.  Last weekend I crossed Canal Street on the bike and three nearby crime cameras caught on fire.

Sorry about that.  Next time I'll read the terms of service.

Many location companies say that when phone users enable location services, their data is fair game. But, The Times found, the explanations people see when prompted to give permission are often incomplete or misleading. An app may tell users that granting access to their location will help them get traffic information, but not mention that the data will be shared and sold. That disclosure is often buried in a vague privacy policy.

"Misleading explanations." Yeah, mostly what that means is an app is either demanding or strongly implying that you enable location tracking just to get the thing to work at all. Meanwhile there's practically nothing that explicitly limits what companies can do with your data once they've acquired it.  There's just a jungle of internal policies and practices.

The article comes with a guide to disabling your phone's location service although it's not at all clear that's going to solve the problem.  Not when such an action is bound to greatly reduce your device's actual functionality.  And certainly not since there's little anybody can do to disable the city's surveillance camera "canopy." The mayor would have to call that off.  But, according to her, "we've barely begun to scratch the surface," of that that network can do.