It's important everyone becomes educated about the fact that virtually every mobile app sells some part of your data that leads to some private company possessing the ability to draw a circle around your house on map and then detect all patterns of life without any PII.
I don't think it's fair to pit this as a US gov't surveillance problem. It's true though - the Government missions involved, where this type of data is relevant, face rather compelling offerings especially in complex times; e.g. immigrant/refugee surges where understanding the flow of people up to the border is important for stability.
All of this data comes from Big/Small/all tech; usually branded as "ad tech" or "mobility data". And the supply chain is rather murky, masked, and rebranded/repackaged numerous times between a network of data providers & downstream businesses.
Working close to Government... I've never seen any mission specifically seeking large-scale citizen-based tracking capabilities. US government in recent timeframes have seemed adamant about not purchasing any US-based location data & are cautious even for non-US based monitoring; especially as they learn more about the origins & scale of mobility data.
I don't think it's fair to pit this as a US gov't surveillance problem. It's true though - the Government missions involved, where this type of data is relevant, face rather compelling offerings especially in complex times; e.g. immigrant/refugee surges where understanding the flow of people up to the border is important for stability.
All of this data comes from Big/Small/all tech; usually branded as "ad tech" or "mobility data". And the supply chain is rather murky, masked, and rebranded/repackaged numerous times between a network of data providers & downstream businesses.
Working close to Government... I've never seen any mission specifically seeking large-scale citizen-based tracking capabilities. US government in recent timeframes have seemed adamant about not purchasing any US-based location data & are cautious even for non-US based monitoring; especially as they learn more about the origins & scale of mobility data.