A survey by The New York Times shows the extent to which mobile device tracking has occurred

Famous media has come up with a database of many created by tracking the location of users of various smartphone applications today.

We all know that the phones we use nowadays are being "abused" to track our location, and here we are not thinking by the authorities for our control. Modern site tracking, though we don't exclude the authorities from this, is done by companies that sell the site for the purpose of selling ads.

While this is itself a major breach of user privacy, we can only imagine what it would be like if this data were purchased or otherwise obtained by someone who had a different idea than that of selling ads.

There are other ideas, of course, many of which are monitoring the population by non-democratic authorities, tracking the location of intelligence by other countries, celebrities, and blackmailing the like.

The extent to which the location of mobile devices is collected and stored can be seen in this excellent research article by The York Times. They have come up with a database of companies working with mobile device locations, after which they have reviewed, researched, and briefly provided worrying data for months.

This database specifically contains information about millions of US users, but nothing indicates that this practice is not being done anywhere in the world, where more, where less.

The New York Times points out that the data contains more than 50 billion mobile device locations, provided by an employee at one of the many site collection companies, and concerned about what might happen if someone decided to abuse, and the same conclusion is shared by The New York Times after their research.

The main problem is that data is collected from many applications, and users can't really do anything to protect it. Claims that this data is anonymous is where the problem becomes really worrying. This is because although the data is really anonymous, it can be very easy to relate to a particular person, especially if it is a celebrity or a person known to the person who owns the data.

The New York Times gives an example of what they could extract from the data. Of all the mobile phones that were in the park in New York, they singled out one. Then for that one cell phone all other locations he was traveling to were available. It is very easy to find out where his work is and where he lives.

With a little further research, it can be discovered that this data is linked to a specific person, and the possibilities for abuse are then unlimited. Those with the data can discover things about certain people who would like to keep them private, such as visiting a particular hospital and the like.

The New York Times article entitled "Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy" is detailed and long, but worth reading if you are interested in the subject.