![]() Then there’s Cuebiq, which collected location data through its SDK and shared that information with the New York Times for multiple articles about how social distancing changed as stay-at-home orders were lifted and states reopened. A company called Unacast used trackers in its SDK to grade counties on how well their residents socially distanced and stayed indoors. That’s how X-Mode got the data that was used to create Tectonix’s spring breakers map. ![]() When you turn on location services for a weather app so it can give you a localized forecast, you may be sending your location data back to someone else. This is usually done through software development kits, or SDKs, which these companies provide to app developers for free in exchange for the information they can collect from them, or a cut of the ads they can sell through them. Your phone is the ideal tool for advertisers and data brokers, both as a means of collecting your information and serving you ads based on it. But it took the Covid-19 pandemic to bring some of these companies, and what they’re capable of, to the forefront. This has been going on for years and is an essential part of the mobile app economy. “The data tells the stories we just can’t see.”īut there was another story there that most of us can’t see: how trackers hidden in smartphone apps are the source of incredible amounts of specific data about us, much of which gets sent to companies you’ve never heard of. “It becomes clear just how massive the potential impact of just one single beach gathering can have in spreading this virus across our nation,” the video’s narrator said. It showed spring breakers leaving a Florida beach to return to their homes across the US, as a series of tiny orange dots congregating on a beach in early March scattered across the country over the following two weeks. In the earlier days of the coronavirus pandemic, an animated map from a company called Tectonix went viral. ![]()
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