Many apps on your phone have pivoted to selling your location data to coronavirus researchers and others

The multi-billion-dollar advertisement technology (ad-tech), notorious for powering invasive targeted online advertising, is these days being used by a number of local US authorities across the country to track citizens’ movements, as a means to decide whether or not to ease the crippling restrictions that became the answer to the coronavirus pandemic.

Ad-tech, that helped propel the likes of Google and Facebook to their status as global behemoths, has a very bad name among digital rights and privacy advocates, because it aggressively and with no real accountability collects and shares personal data of users, enabling not only tracking but also profiling, and giving people no control over how and where their data is used.