Another example is Safegraph, a company that partners with all those apps that are tracking your behavior to amass “high precision/low false positive” data collected “in background from large populations.” According to the Washington Post, the company collected 17 trillion location markers from 10 million smartphones in November 2016 alone, data that were sold to two university researchers, among others, for a detailed study of political influences on patterns of family behavior on Thanksgiving Day that year. Despite the widely employed euphemisms of “anonymization” and “deidentification,” Safegraph tracks individual devices and the movement of their owners throughout the day, producing data that are sufficiently granular to be able to identify individuals’ home locations.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 543