To the Surprise of No One

[SCCY Marshal]

"...After years of warning from researchers, journalists, and even governments, someone used highly sensitive location data from a smartphone app to track and publicly harass a specific person. In this case, Catholic Substack publication The Pillar said it used location data ultimately tied to Grindr to trace the movements of a priest, and then outed him publicly as potentially gay without his consent..." (https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxp8/grindr-location-data-priest-weaponization-app)

A cranky old tech writer put it best:

"iPone, schmiPhone. The way I see it, the only good phone's a landline and the phone should be made of bakelite." (https://media.phoneboy.com/najingles/NoTechNews.mp3)

[jh9]

"...After years of warning from researchers, journalists, and even governments, someone used highly sensitive location data from a smartphone app to track and publicly harass a specific person. In this case, Catholic Substack publication The Pillar said it used location data ultimately tied to Grindr to trace the movements of a priest, and then outed him publicly as potentially gay without his consent..." (https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbxp8/grindr-location-data-priest-weaponization-app)

A cranky old tech writer put it best:

"iPone, schmiPhone. The way I see it, the only good phone's a landline and the phone should be made of bakelite." (https://media.phoneboy.com/najingles/NoTechNews.mp3)

Along the same vein: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/11/19/uber-privacy-tracking/19285481/

As mentioned in the vice article, I think a lot of the de-anonymization magic comes from the fact that people are, generally, very consistent in their daily routines. Even if it's just a couple days a week. That was one of the takeaways with Apple's location data leak ("https://www.computerworld.com/article/2507791/iphone-secretly-tracks-user-location--say-researchers.html) years ago.

Once you can use a known daily routine to filter down to a single user in a given dataset, you can filter out that known routine from the rest of that user's data and get to what is potentially The Good Stuff. Especially if you have app data from somewhere like tindr/gindr/uber/lyft/etc where the location aspect is part of the core functionality and can't be disabled.

[revchuck38]

That location data was commercially available. Here's (https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/on-scandal/) an article about it. From that article (my emphasis):


...it was the Pillar’s reporting on this, based on commercially available location data bought by a third party and shared with them, that led to Burris’s resignation.

As a Catholic, I'm glad he got nailed.

[MickAK]

As a Catholic, I'm glad he got nailed.

Phrasing

[revchuck38]

Phrasing

Yeah, well...:rolleyes:

[beenalongtime]

Phrasing

Thorn in your side? Cross he will have to bear?

[paherne]

There's always confession...

A gay priest, shocker.

I'll wait for someone else to cast the first stone.

[BehindBlueI's]

A gay priest, shocker.


First time for everything, I guess.