Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan wrote a piece for The New York Times Sunday Review Opinion pages about Smartphones being tracking devices.  Cell phone location services have become very refined in recent years.  Phone service providers can tell where you are with nearly pinpoint accuracy.  As the article says, if they can determine where you are, they can surmise what you are doing. You may wonder, “Why would the phone company care where I am or what I am doing?” The phone company may or may not care to mine this information for product sales pitches or selling your information to targeted mailing lists. But they do give your information to law enforcement, increasingly without insisting upon the law enforcement agency providing a search warrant. And when they do insist on a search warrant, the process has become very streamlined, somewhat understandably for rapid response in identifying true terrorists operating on our soil.

The other consideration, separate from location data, is the sheer volume of data about you and your activities that is maintained on your smartphone, and law enforcement has routinely exercised what they consider their right to confiscate your cell phone and sift it for information–without a warrant.

If someone has information about where you were, coupled with your friends’ information, not only can they determine where you have been, but they can predict where you are likely to be in the future. That doesn’t creep you out?

Okay.  They can also determine if you are likely to be a heavy drinker, spend a lot of time at church, sneak out on your spouse, spend a lot of time supporting a particular political candidate, or maybe you’re getting a certain type of medical treatment. You might not mind sharing that information, but aren’t you concerned about who might want to analyze that information about you?

Then there are all the apps that want your cell phone number for “security” and easy access if your account is compromised. Once they tie all the information from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and any number of other sites together with your location data, they can tell, perhaps, if you are truthful — is what you’re saying on social networks consistent with your location data?

Some people say they don’t worry about it, because they don’t do anything wrong.  That’s not the point.

What happens when the aggregated data presents an inaccurate picture? What happens when the definition of “wrong” changes? A couple years ago, our Director of Homeland Security made some chilling  conjectures.  She intimated internal threats to national security could be from members of the Tea Party or disgruntled veterans. Members of the Tea Party peacefully protest the direction government has been taking over the last few years and work within the system to bring about change more in line with the Constitution.  Veterans were included in that list, presumably because they are familiar with how weapons work.  I’m not a member of the Tea Party, but I am a veteran.  Most veterans take their oath of enlistment or commissioning seriously, and that oath says we will “protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”  Is the Department of Homeland Security afraid veterans will be protecting the Constitution for domestic enemies, implying they are afraid veterans will be thinking their government has become the enemy?  If not, why would they be considering us as threads?  Yes, there are the Timothy McVeigh types. They are a risk, but to single them out in a Homeland Security report, I would have to guess they are afraid there are a lot of veterans who are likely to take the approach McVeigh chose.

I recently renewed my driver license, and I had the option of having my veteran status identified on the license.  I chose not to exercise that right, because I’m not certain how it might be used in the future.  Perhaps that was silly, because I have Disabled Veteran license plates, so the identifying information is already prominently displayed.

There are also more moderate misuses of data aggregation.  We recently received a solicitation for one of those extended warranty deals for a truck my husband purchased in 2006 that we have not owned since 2009. There’s nothing wrong with that (except for very outdated data), but the solicitation arrived addressed to his ex-wife.  They were divorced in 1987, and her name, hopefully obviously, was not in any way associated with the purchase of that truck.  How did that juxtaposition happen?  It probably happened the same way we receive solicitations for discounts on luxury vehicles in his daughter’s name.  What’s the common denominator?  His USAA number from when he was married to his ex-wife. (Thank you, USAA for selling this information.) I wonder if his ex-wife gets solicitations in my name. If so, she must REALLY be puzzled. Alternatively, my husband’s father died in 1999.  Hubby was the executor of the estate. To facilitate closing out the estate, he had his father’s mailing address changed to our house. In the process, some of his father’s wife’s mail (junk mail, typically) began arriving at the house.  Just last week, we got a Bed Bath and Beyond flier. We don’t know how much junk mail is arriving for his father, because they have the same first name and middle initial (different middle names, so he isn’t a junior), but his father’s wife has never lived here, nor did we have her mail changed to this address (presumably, it was changed to her daughter’s house, where she moved after her husband died).  With all this data collation, who is trying to make sure anything is accurate?

For a hypothetical situation. What if you are innocently attending your Thursday night Canasta game, and, unbeknownst to you, local authorities have concluded that Canasta players are really a subversive group (because, really, who plays Canasta these days?) plotting to overthrow the government. Police raid your game, one of your group members reaches into her purse for her cell phone and brandishes it to tell the officers what a mistake they are making as she prepares to call and complain.  The officers, believing this is a subversive group who may be dangerous, have itchy trigger fingers and blow your entire “splinter cell” group away in an epic one-sided gun battle — only to discover you were all unarmed and really were playing Canasta.  But the government doesn’t want that information to get out, so you, who are no longer there to defend yourselves, become a subversive group.  That goes into the news report, and everyone in town is on edge because sleeper cells are in their midst.

Sure, that’s far-fetched for what we believe is possible, but it’s not far-fetched in a topsy-turvey world where the “enemy” has been defined to include what used to be considered model, loyal citizens.  What information you choose to provide matters.  Companies trying to make it “easy” for you to access everything are not necessarily doing it for your convenience.  Finally, if you use your Facebook login (or any other similar account — Twitter could result in the same problem) for everything, are you prepared to lose access to every place you go if Facebook shuts down your account?  They do that sometimes.  I friend of mine (someone I know in real life) had her page shut down by Facebook after it was hacked and truly disgusting photos were posted.  Photos she would NEVER have posted. People who knew her, thinking they were helping, reported the photos as spam.  Facebook shut the account down.  Two weeks later, she was able to convince Facebook she was the victim, and Facebook reactivated her now vacant account.  None of her Friends were there, and she was using it as a working author, so she didn’t have a full list of everyone she’d friended to be able to contact them to let them know what happened.  She chose to close the account and not use Facebook for any reason.  After I saw that and realized the implications of using Facebook login at other sites, I disassociated myself from the few accounts where I’d allowed that to be activated.  If you haven’t considered the implications for you of this possibility, I urge you to do so and act accordingly.

This is a “Wild West” time for privacy on the internet, but once your personal data is out there for all to gather and use, you can’t get it back.  If you delete something from the internet, there’s a very good chance it’s cached somewhere and can still be found.  So far, the approaches the government has been trying to take have been draconian and not conducive to a freely accessible internet.  The decisions made in the next few years will matter, and you owe it to yourself to follow the subject and look for possible implications for your life as well as learn to avoid pitfalls that exist.