Phone-tracking firm Anomaly Six has amassed so much app data it recently held an incredible closed-door demonstration: The company geofenced the CIA and NSA, tracked someone who had visited both sites around the country, and then de-anonymized them theintercept.com
Anomaly Six claims it can track the movements of ~3 billion devices in near real time using nothing but location pings leaking from smartphone apps. An Anomaly Six sales rep joked that their surveillance power is based the fact that most ppl "probably donβt read" the fine print
Anomaly Six was pitching Zignal Labs, a Dataminr-style social media surveillance firm that's frequently cited in the press, which was interested in how they could augment their Twitter-watching software with A6's GPS-tracking tools.
The premise was extremely powerful: Imagine if you could not only monitor tweets in real-time, but then find the people who tweeted them, and monitor their past and future movements? (A Zignal spokesperson told me they never went through with the integration)
Perhaps A6's most powerful feature is something they call the "Regularity button." Despite claims from tech cos and data brokers that location data is "anonymized," this button lets clients de-anonymize devices by automatically inferring where the owner works and sleeps
After tracking a phone that had visited CIA, NSA, Fort Bliss, and a Jordanian air force base, A6 used the Regularity button to find the device owner's home in suburban Maryland.
There is of course a giant irony w/ someone surveilling an apparent member of the US intelligence community without their permission. But that was just a demoβthis power could be used to track the movements of anyone on behalf of any paying customer, like your employer.
According to the demo, A6 software was able to track Russian troop movements near Ukraine, find a Chinese nuclear sub, and follow the USS Eisenhower by surveilling the phones of the sailors on board. But there absolutely *nothing* stopping this tech from tracking ordinary people
To me, the real worry here isn't that American spies could be easily tracked, but that the locations of ordinary people around the world are for sale, and can be effortlessly monitored using data they likely have no idea their phones are leaking 24/7.
The sale of personal location data is nothing new and has been happening without oversight or regulation for many years. But companies like A6 show what's possible when you combine gigantic personal location datasets with an easy to use UI and turn that package into a product.
It also can't be overstated that if the gov wants to use this tech, they don't need a warrant, they can simply buy access. The 4th Amendment is supposed to protect you from this, but commercial app data provides an enormous loophole.
if you have any information about the surveillance practices of Anomaly Six or other location-tracking firms, please feel free to contact me via Signal at +1 978 261 7389 (from a device you personally own)
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