A damning new WSJ report says a small U.S. government contractor embedded software in over 500 apps, tracking millions of people worldwide.
According to the report:
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 is the company in question, apparently boasting in marketing material that it was “able to draw location data from more than 500 mobile applications” from its own software development kit, embedded directly in some apps:
Anomaly Six says it embeds its own SDK in some apps, and in other cases gets location data from other partners.
The report says Anomaly Six is a federal contractor that provides global location data to “to branches of the U.S. government and private-sector clients”. It told WSJ that it restricts the sale of U.S. mobile phone movement data only to the private sector, however.