Many private-sector companies in the advertising and marketing world buy and sell geolocation data, sometimes reselling it to government agencies or contractors. But the direct collection of such data by a business closely linked to US national security agencies is unusual.
該公司營銷材料中介紹稱,他們能夠從500多個應用程序中提取位置數據,且其中一部分數據是通過其直接植入到應用里的軟件開發工具包獲取的。 Anomaly Six LLC a Virginia-based company founded by two US 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.
如果消費者允許包含該軟件的應用程序訪問手機的GPS坐標,該公司就可以通過SDK獲得手機的位置信息。
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.
The partnerships between data brokers and app makers are typically closely held trade secrets within the world of commercial-data sales.
According to interviews with numerous people in the industry, there is little regulation in the US about the buying and selling of location data, leading to what one industry veteran called "the Wild West".
【視頻來源:中國日報抖音】
The two founders of Anomaly Six formerly worked for Babel Street and left in 2018, according to the lawsuit.
“Babel Street兩年前對Anomaly Six及其創始人提起的訴訟為我們提供了一個窗口,讓我們得以一窺這個競爭激烈、高度隱秘的市場,即把用戶數據作為產品提供給美國政府。” A lawsuit filed by Babel Street two years ago against Anomaly Six and its founders offers a window into the competitive and largely secretive market of providing consumer location products to the US government.
Brandan Huff, a former Army counterintelligence officer, had managed Babel Street's relationship with the Defense Department and had also worked for numerous other defense contractors. The other, Jeffrey Heinz, was also previously in the U.S. Army and had managed Babel Street's relationships with the Justice Department, US Cyber Command, civilian federal agencies and the intelligence community, court records show.
Babel Street doesn't publicly advertise Locate X and binds clients and users to secrecy about even its existence, according to contracts and user agreements reviewed by the Journal.
Developed with input from US government officials Locate X is widely used by military intelligence units who work on gathering "open source" intelligence, or information taken from publicly available sources.
Babel Street also has contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and many other civilian agencies, federal contracting data shows.
Anomaly Six was founded by defense-contracting veterans who worked closely with government agencies for most of their careers and built a company to cater in part to national-security agencies, according to court records and interviews.
“Anomaly Six是一家退役軍人擁有的小型企業,對來自移動設備的位置數據進行處理和可視化,用于分析和洞察,”“我們利用來自大量第一手資源的詳細位置數據,為團隊、行為和模式提供洞察。 "Anomaly Six is a veteran-owned small business that processes and visualizes location data sourced from mobile devices for analytics and insights," the company said in response to questions for this article. "We leverage detailed location data from numerous first-party sources to provide insights into groups, behaviors, and patterns."
從應用程序中提取的數據中,每部手機通常都有一個字母數字標識符,該標識符與手機所有者的姓名沒有關聯。但是隨著手機使用時間推移,可以讓分析人員推斷出它的所有權——例如,手機在晚上的位置和晚上可能是手機擁有者居住的地方。
In the data drawn from apps, each cellphone is typically represented by an alphanumeric identifier that isn't linked to the name of the cellphone's owner. But the movement patterns of a phone over time can allow analysts to deduce its ownership—for example, where the phone is located during the evenings and overnight is likely where the phone-owner lives.
A group of academic researchers using Babel Street's software were able to monitor the movement of devices at Russian military facilities as part of a project for the US Army, the Journal also reported last month.
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