I'm trying to figure out why I could care if someone tracked my cell phone.
I don't particularly care. I have a boring life, with nothing to hide.
But there are a lot of people in this world who do completely legal things that probably wouldn't want all of those things to be public knowledge. Things that could be used to blackmail them, or simply embarrass them in front of family, friends, or colleagues. I.e. someone from a religious family is frequenting gay bars and an opportunistic criminal attempts to blackmail them to keep it quiet?
Or, as in the NYT story, they were able to use location tracking to identify someone who was interviewing for a new job--after the fact, based on linkedin posts showing the guy changing jobs several weeks after the location data showed him making an uncharacteristic trip to that company's offices. What happens when employers start paying data services to data-mine this location information to identify disgruntled employees and let them go?
I'm sure there is a market for all this data, and a portion of that market can use the data for nefarious purposes. Heck, at the very least, someone could use that data to case houses as part of a burglary ring, knowing that based on predictable patterns of people leaving their houses on certain days and being gone for predictable amounts of time that nobody will be home.
Does some of this seem far-fetched? Perhaps... Will I be surprised when we see cases of all of these things happening over the next few years? Nope.
