Have any journalists and/or leakers exposed exactly what these tech companies are sharing? As much as I've heard about data collection and sharing by big tech, I feel like I don't see much in the way of samples or example data. Even the forced GDPR data releases I've seen haven't been extraordinarily in-depth. Surely there must be some articles out there that I'm missing?
* https://www.advanresearch.com/
It comes from the telcos directly (think Sprint phones with custom OS installs), it comes from popular mobile SDKs (e.g. why Yahoo bought Flurry), and it comes from apps who simply sell the data directly.
There is one journalist who actively covers this sort of PII/data-selling world: Joseph Cox at Vice [1]. The only US-based legislator who actively fights against this is Senator Wyden.
It's simple - an app asks for background location permissions, then uploads all the datapoints and timestamps the OS gives them to their servers, which is then resold with "anonymization" that just replaces any personal information with an impersonal unique identifier.
That's the reason Apple/Google have clamped down so hard on location permissions since then. But even a degraded dataset is still valuable - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/fog-revealed-guided-to...
I think that the answer to this is "yes, multiple times, often multiple times on the same companies up and down every level of the stack".
And some of the companies brag about their abilities. There was some surveillance company which was showing how Covid spread after spring break in Florida by gleefully posting screenshots from their tool that tracks individual phone locations.
Do you have a link? It's always sort of discussed as if everyone knows exactly what's happening, but I'm specifically looking for links that break it down.