The Times Privacy Project was given access to a data set with more than 50 billion location “pings” from the phones of more than 12 million Americans across several major cities. Each piece of information came down to a set of coordinates in time. The result is a tapestry of movement laid across a city grid — like the computer game SimCity, only real.
This granular location data — the kind that is collected by hundreds of mobile apps and then shared with dozens of location data brokers — may seem like a catalog of the mundane. But the aggregate is closer to total surveillance — an exact record of the rhythms of a living, breathing community.
Where Even the Children Are Being Tracked by Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson in the NY Times