I am publishing below an excerpt (called the 'main point') from my post with exhaustive links called YOUR PRIVATE LIFE JUST SUDDENLY EXPLODED. The rest of the post and a complete bibliography of links is at the source.

YOUR PRIVATE LIFE JUST SUDDENLY EXPLODED.

Evidence surfaced recently -- proof -- that each of us, that every one of us with a cellphone, might as well have a corresponding dot moving and blinking in real time, geolocated on a map somewhere. Did I say might as well? I mean does. (Yes that map is real.)

Find links below.

Let that sink in. THAT GIANT MAP IS REAL. It is a map of all connected devices. If you have a phone, or laptop, or tablet, or router for that matter, you are on it. I mean that absolutely literally.

If you own a cell phone, this means you.

[snip]

First we learned that our private location information may be, and is, easily retrieved, without a warrant, or our informed consent, and with little to no oversight, at the will, or even whim of almost any police officer in America...

Then, we learned that, until recently, your location information could be retrieved by absolutely anyone with your phone number.

I repeat, up until may 17th, 2018, it was trivially easy for absolutely anyone to locate absolutely anyone else's phone WITH ONLY THE NUMBER…

… and it very probably still isn't that hard.

I say "until may 17th, 2018," because that's when this company, whose actions was busted by this security researcher, "fixed" the security vulnerability that enabled anyone, armed with a cell number, to locate it geographically in real time. They disabled the free demo of the service after being found out.

That's all they did to fix it: they took the webpage that contained the free demo of their software-as-a-service product down off of the internet. The cached version of the page goes to their official statement about the incident, which mentions that they claim that the numbers this researcher plugged in were the only people affected.

I say "and it very probably still isn't that hard" because the page was to a free demo. Anyone who already has an account can still do what was demonstrated. Furthermore, it is not a stretch of the imagination to think that anyone with a business name and enough money can still, easily, open a new account.

The digital shadows we cast are data-mineable details that are the 21st century incarnation of the papers and effects of the 4th amendment to the United States Constitution.

But you need to know this: without a reasonable expectation, personal privacy is much, much harder to defend. If 'everyone knows' that 'all the information' on 'everyone' is 'collected,' we would have no legal basis to complain. None.

So do it again. However illogical this may seem, if it is true, its true:

"As an American citizen, I have every expectation of privacy."

Links, graphics, & bibliography at the full post:
YOUR PRIVATE LIFE JUST SUDDENLY EXPLODED.

Your welcome.

Be seeing you.