- A new report exposes how a federal contractor secretly put the government tracking software in hundreds of mobile apps.
- The data from this tracking is then sold to the U.S. government for undisclosed purposes.
- This tactic is misleading because the tracking is not disclosed. However, it turns out to be completely legal.
A new report from today The Wall Street Journal exposes another one regarding development when it comes to tracking mobile phones. According to the report, at least one federal contractor installs government tracking software in more than 500 mobile applications.
The contractor – a Virginia-based company called Anomaly Six LLC – pays mobile developers to include their own tracking code in their apps. The trackers then collect anonymous data from our phones and Anomaly Six aggregates that store data and sell it to the U.S. government.
It sounds crazy, but it happens. What’s more, it turns out to be completely legal.
Government tracking: What you need to know
The report of The Wall Street Journal makes it clear that Anomaly Six’s tracking software appears in more than 500 mobile applications. However, Anomaly Six would not disclose the apps with whom it has partnerships. The WSJ could not retrieve this information through other methods.
One would assume that you could dive into the terms of contradiction of popular apps and find references to Anomaly Six. However, that would be a waste of time, as app developers do not have to disclose the Anomaly Six tracker to users. Therefore, you could have one or even dozens of apps with Anomaly Six’s government tracking code and you would have no idea.
The tracking code used by this federal contractor does not need to be disclosed to the user by the app on which it runs.
To be clear, the data that Anomaly Six collects is anonymized. Each smartphone is attached to an alphanumeric identifier that is not linked to the name of the owner of the phone. Of course, there are plenty of ways to use “anonymous” data like this to find out who owns the device. For example, the device is likely to be empty at night when the owner is sleeping, and the location of the device at that time is likely to be the owner’s home. Once you have that info, it is not difficult to close other user habits, such as where they work, what they use to commute, where they go out to eat, and so on.
Since Anomaly Six does not disclose its government tracking software, there is no way to take it down. In short: you are being tracked and your smartphone habits are being sold to the government and there is nothing you can do about it.
How is it legal?
Since the idea of tracking location data via smartphones is still so new, laws and regulations related to the practice are behind the curve. Since the data that Anomaly Six collects is technically anonymous, and because it does not sell the data for commercial purposes – or advertising or marketing – it is fine to do so in the eyes of the law.
Related: Is selling your privacy for a cheaper phone really a good idea?
The big question, however, is what the government is doing with this data. Is it just keeping tabs on its citizens? Does it use it for law enforcement purposes? Does it use it as a counter-terrorism tactic? There are many questions here, but Anomaly Six has no intention of answering them. According to the company, the company it conducts is considered confidential (although technically not classified), so it can not elaborate on its business partners without their strict permission. Of course, that permission is not likely to be easy to obtain.
