The data bazaar

A view through a telescope from high up on a watchtower at night, roughly a fifth-floor elevation, looking out and steeply down across a twilight marketplace well below.

Every stall in the bazaar sells something ordinary enough on its own. A position. A timestamp. A number that is not a name. The stallholders are courteous and licensed wherever licensing exists. What the customer does with the goods afterwards is no part of the sale. Walk the whole row, buy one small legal thing at each stall, and the ordinary items assemble into a map of where a particular person sleeps, works, prays and drinks.

The goods come from phones, gathered by apps for advertising, passed through auctions that run in milliseconds, repackaged by brokers and listed on marketplaces. The customers include police forces and interior ministries, and the sales approaches reach further: a luxury goods conglomerate has been offered a place at the counter. The paperwork is in order at every stall.

Disclaimer

No personal data was harmed in the compiling of these notes, although a certain amount of it was almost certainly observed doing the reading. The observatory takes no view on the terms and conditions accepted in 2013, which were, as agreed at the time, binding on one party and aspirational for the other.