[liberationtech] WSJ reporting on a shade of "Surveillance Capitalism"

[Robert Mathews (OSIA)]

The WSJ published their reporting (below), on August 7.   Still, I hope
that this item will be of interest to a few here.   The article is
behind a "paywall", but, we could potentially provide someone having
trouble reaching it, with a "fair-use" copy.

On the whole, and to be certain, it must be understood that CONTRACTORS
perform work for customers, and their customers have requirements
(objectives), which need to be met. 


*"U.S. Government Contractor Embedded Software in Apps to Track Phones"*
*Anomaly Six has ties to military, intelligence agencies and draws
location data from more than 500 apps with hundreds of millions of users*
By Byron Tau
*The Wall Street Journal*
Aug. 7, 2020 10 00 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-government-contractor-embedded-software-in-apps-to-track-phones-11596808801

"WASHINGTON—A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and
intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile
apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of
mobile phones world-wide, according to interviews and documents reviewed
by The Wall Street Journal.

Anomaly Six LLC a Virginia-based company founded by two U.S. military
veterans with a background in intelligence, said in marketing material
it is able to draw location data from more than 500 mobile applications,
in part through its own software development kit, or SDK, that is
embedded directly in some of the apps.

An SDK allows the company to obtain the phone’s location if consumers
have allowed the app containing the software to access the phone’s GPS
coordinates.

App publishers often allow third-party companies, for a fee, to insert
SDKs into their apps. The SDK maker then sells the consumer data
harvested from the app, and the app publisher gets a chunk of revenue.
But consumers have no way to know whether SDKs are embedded in apps;
most privacy policies don’t disclose that information. Anomaly Six says
it embeds its own SDK in some apps, and in other cases gets location
data from other partners."

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