It’s truly amazing when you think about all of the capabilities your smartphone possesses.
You can navigate anywhere you want to in the world.
In seconds, you can have a face-to-face conversation with someone, regardless of their location.
But with those awesome powers comes privacy concerns.
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We hand over so much of our own personal data, like our movements and health records, to our phones. Companies then have the ability to access that data.
Take for example the following report from KY3 regarding the use of cell phone data to track partiers in Lake of the Ozarks during Memorial Day weekend:
It's been more than a week since videos of pool bar parties at the Lake of the Ozarks went viral on Memorial Weekend.
Since then, the Camden County Health Department announced a positive case from Boone County visited multiple pool bars in the area.
"It's easy to think that you go to a place and you put yourself at risk, but a lot of people don't think of what that footprint looks like when you potentially contract something like this and then go back to your home, go on the rest of your vacation, wherever it may be," said Mike DiMarco, Chief Marketing Officer of Tectonix.
The company uses anonymized cell phone location data from X Mode Social. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, the company has done several cell phone tracing videos.
"One of the first high profile ones we did was spring break in Fort Lauderdale," DiMarco said. "We took a look at devices active at a single beach, and then looked at the sprawl, and we're actually able to see devices going across the country."
After the viral videos of packed pool bars on Memorial Day Weekend, Tectonix focused on the Lake of the Ozarks.
This first part of the video shows the entire lake from the Monday before Memorial Day, to the holiday itself. Every blue dot you see on the screen represents a cell phone.
"As the week progresses, you can see the map populate with more and more records," DiMarco explained.
Tectonix then drew a circle around Backwater Jacks. Its one of the bars seen in many of those viral photos and videos, and is one of the bars a positive case of COVID-19 spent time at that Saturday.
The data shows after the weekend was over, those blue dots, or cell phones, spread out all across the midwest.
St. Louis, Kansas City, and Omaha, Nebraska saw a lot of activity.
"I think we saw about 14 states that got some version of traffic," DiMarco said.
While in this case cell phone tracking was used for a purportedly “good” purpose, what if that’s not always the case?
Cell phone users should also have a right to know that companies may be tracking their every move.
People pointed out on Twitter how similar methods may be used to track protesters:
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