The technology f this company could be used, illegally now, to identify women who went to an abortion clinic in another state.
Ever heard of Babel Street? Unless youre a data and analytics enthusiast, its likely you havent. The Virginia-based technology company isnt a household name the way that Google and Facebook are. And yet the company most likely knows a hell of a lot about you and everyone else in your household.
Babel Street, you see, has a people-tracking service called Locate X, that allows customers to track individual mobile users by their Mobile Advertising ID: a string of characters that uniquely identifies your phone or other smart device. Where it gets really creepy is that, according to recent reporting from Krebs on Security and other outlets, Babel Street allows its customers, which include government agencies, to draw a digital polygon around nearly any location on a map of the world, and view a slightly dated (by a few days) time-lapse history of the mobile devices seen coming in and out of the specified area.
What does this mean? Well, among many other disturbing things, it means that you could use Locate X to zoom in on an abortion clinic and see exactly who is going in and out of it.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/26/phone-location-tracking-abortion-surveillance-babel-street