Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the wo
[23 Oct 2024]
Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the world. Abortion clinics, places of worship, and individual people can all be monitored without a warrant.
On a computer screen a map shows the movements of smartphones around the globe. Zooming into an abortion clinic in the south of the United States, the online tool shows more than 700 red dots over the clinic itself, each representing a phone, and by extension, a person.
The tool, called Locate X and made by a company called Babel Street, then narrows down to the movements of a specific device which had visited the clinic. This phone started at a residence in Alabama in mid-June. It then went by a Lowe’s Home Improvement store, traveled along a highway, went past a gas station, visited a church, crossed over into Florida, and then stopped at the abortion clinic for approximately two hours. They had only been to the clinic once, according to the data.
The device then headed back, and crossed back over into Alabama. The tool also showed their potential home, based on the high frequency at which the device stopped there. The tool clearly shows this home address on its map interface.
In other words, someone had traveled from Alabama, where abortion is illegal after the June 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, to an abortion clinic in Florida, where abortion is limited but still available early in a pregnancy. Based on the data alone, it is unclear who exactly this person is or what they were doing, whether they were receiving an abortion themselves, assisting someone seeking one, or going to the clinic for another reason. But it would be trivial for U.S. authorities, some of which already have access to this tool, to go one step further and unmask this or other abortion clinic visitors.
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The videos also show that while Apple and Google have taken steps either to stymie the flow of location data in general, or remove sensitive locations like abortion clinics from their own banks of data, the highly sensitive movements of visitors to clinics or essentially any other location are still exposed on a massive scale and finding their way into tools used by U.S. law enforcement. Through a complex data supply chain involving apps or ads on a phone, peoples’ movements are included in Locate X as a side-product of the mobile advertising system.
And all of this tracking is possible without a warrant.
