How the US government uses data brokers to spy on citizens

Location data that users of mobile devices willingly surrender to a plethora of apps that request it is ending up in some places that a majority of those users are fully unaware of.

And yet their every move can be retraced or monitored in this way, revealing their activities, inclinations, and personalities: where they live, work, what religious sites they visit, and which protests they take part in.

But rather than being confined to the apps themselves to enable their functionality - which is how the need to harvest location data is explained in the first place - this information is sold and shared, changing hands from app developers to data brokers to advertisers, and lately more and more often with US law enforcement, including the military, and spy agencies.

And this gives the government the ability to monitor millions of people both in the US and abroad, depending on which of these - the FBI, ICE, Secret Service, etc. - gets their hands on these huge datasets.

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