Your Phone's Location History Is for Sale: Inside the $32 Billion Data Broker Industry That Tracks Every Move You Make

Your phone sent your GPS coordinates to 47 different companies yesterday. You consented to this by tapping "Allow" on a weather app 18 months ago. You probably don't remember doing it. You almost certainly don't remember which app it was. But somewhere in a data center right now, a server owned by a company you've never heard of holds a precise log of where you slept last night, where you worked this morning, which hospital you visited three Tuesdays ago, and which political rally you attended in November. That log has been bought and sold multiple times. It will be sold again before you finish reading this article. Welcome to the location data economy. The SDK Supply Chain: How Your Location Gets Harvested The mechanism is elegant in its invisibility. You download a flashlight app, a local news app, a weather widget. The developer who built it — a small shop trying to monetize their creation — has embedded a third-party software development kit (SDK) provided by a data broker. This SD