In 2013 a group of MIT and Harvard computer scientists demonstrated that because individuals tend to have idiosyncratic mobility signatures, any analyst with the right tools can easily extract the mobility pattern of a specific individual within a large anonymized data set of location meta-data. Another research team demonstrated that data collected by seemingly “innocuous” smartphone-embedded sensors, such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers, can be used to infer “an ever-growing range of human activities and even moods.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 766