Whoops: Data Broker Data Reveals Rich Visitors To Jeffrey Epstein’s Island
from the who-needs-a-privacy-law dept
You might recall that, back in February, Senator Ron Wyden’s office revealed how a data broker named Near Intelligence had collected the data of women visiting abortion clinics, then sold that data (via a proxy) to right wing activists. Those activists then turned around and used it to target vulnerable women with health care misinformation.
The scandal perfectly exemplified the very real hazards of having a Congress that’s too corrupt to regulate data brokers or pass even a basic internet-era privacy law.
When it originally went public, Near bragged about how they owned a database tracking the movement and online behavior of 1.6 billion people across 44 countries. That company ultimately went bankrupt, resulting in a rush by Wyden and the FTC to ensure that data didn’t bounce around the open web.
But the data broker’s impact lives on all the same. As part of an exclusive report (paywalled, Quartz alternative) Wired found datasets (left exposed online) collected by the company that tracked visitors to Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious pervert island down to the centimeter. The data exposes the movement patterns gleaned from 200 mobile devices across 11,279 coordinates as they visited the island:
“The coordinates that Near Intelligence collected and left exposed online pinpoint locations to within a few centimeters of space. Visitors were tracked as they moved from the Ritz-Carlton on neighboring St. Thomas Island…The tracking continued after they arrived. From inside Epstein’s enigmatic waterfront temple to the pristine beaches, pools, and cabanas scattered across his 71-acres of prime archipelagic real estate.”
The Wired report notes that the data on Epstein’s guests was created by an unknown third-party client using a free trial of Near’s systems. Those systems are based on an intelligence platform formerly known as Vista (since folded into a product called Pinnacle). And again, Wired kind of buries the lede: that the data was found openly accessible online.
“WIRED discovered several so-called Vista reports while examining Pinnacle’s publicly accessible code. While the specific URLs for the reports are difficult to find, Google’s web crawlers were able to locate at least two other publicly accessible Vista reports: one geofencing the Westfield Mall of the Netherlands and another targeting Saipan-Ledo Park in El Paso, Texas.”
It’s not hard to see the problem with dodgy international companies tracking granular, detailed online behavior down to the centimeter, then failing to secure that data as part of a massive market economy that sees very little oversight. It makes the hysteria surrounding TikTok seem laughable, yet mysteriously gets far less press and regulatory attention because U.S. profits are involved.
In this case the data revealed the dodgy behavior of pedophile shitheads; but the data could just as easily have included any manner of easily abused and exploited sensitive user data, including that of marginalized folks.
Half of the companies involved in tracking this data have since been acquired or changed their names — all part of the intentionally convoluted industry specifically designed to make oversight and regulation as difficult as possible. Near Intelligence has since been reincorporated and rebranded as Azira.
Outside of scattered FTC action, the U.S. doesn’t even try to ethically rein in this sector for two reasons: one, Congress is too corrupt to resist the advances of a coalition of massive companies with unlimited lobbying budgets, keen to see the data monetization party continue. Two: the U.S. government also exploits this lack of oversight to hoover up data itself and, in many cases, avoid getting traditional warrants.
This kind of data isn’t just valuable to marketers. It’s valuable to city planners, sociologists, and traffic management firms. It’s super valuable to military contractors and the military. But it’s also hugely beneficial to global governments (including authoritarian ones), and I’d wager the intelligence systems they’ve built to exploit it make Edward Snowden-era surveillance look downright adorable.
There’s no financial incentive for anyone involved in this chain of dysfunction to behave ethically or implement reform. And the scale at which this dysfunction now operates is mind boggling.
So despite endless scandal, this data surveillance free-for-all continues unabated. At least until there’s a scandal so ugly (likely involving mass fatalities, some unprecedented embarrassment for the rich and powerful, or both) that Congress is shaken from its corrupt apathy and forced to pass some kind of basic guardrails.
Filed Under: corruption, data broker, epstein island, jeffrey epstein, location data, privacy, ron wyden, security, surveillance
Companies: near intelligence
Comments on “Whoops: Data Broker Data Reveals Rich Visitors To Jeffrey Epstein’s Island”
Until someone compiles the list of burners linked to Congress on the island nothing will change.
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I’d like to see the politicians claim that the data is “anonymized” if that were to happen.
I love how tons of us third parties get fucked over more or less incidentally (or as a matter of course, more like), US residency/citizenship or not, because nearly half the world’s Tier 1 operators and their exchanges are US-based.
That list includes historically supremely security-minded and competent outfits such as AT&T, Sprint, and whatever the Verizon T1 is called now, by the way, which has always given me a bad taste in the everywhere whenever I’m reminded of it.
And when congress is forced to do something, it will be some kind of knee jerk over-reaction that somehow makes the problem worse.
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And that’s the sad but true fact, right here.
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Ha. They will just claim “national security” and make it illegal to collect and sell data on them, but the rest of us? Perfectly legal still.
Backup?
Someone has made a backup of that dataset .. right?
How many will be charged for sexual assault because they kept theirs pants with your phone in pocket during the whole visit in the island?
This data could be used for good!
Oh never mind, its worth more being used for bad.
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Kind of the point of being bad, isn’t it? If crime didn’t pay, it would not have a lot going for it.
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Yeah. To everyone who says, “Crime doesn’t pay”: *points at data brokers in violation of privacy protection laws, including Comcast Corporation through Sky Group*.
However, when you’re looking at Find My Phone data, the phone was not within a whole house. A 2009 study claims “within 8 meters” (A 2019 study apparently says 13 meters.)
While sure, different methods provide different accuracies, “down to the centimeter” is either irresponsible hype, or clueless credulity. You know, like those cops had before they got sued.
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You’re conflating two different technologies to come to the wrong conclusion. It’s been possible get sub meter location accuracy on android for like a decade no thanks to the addition of GNSS and carrier phase processing:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9867132/
Also, there’s Wi-Fi RTT, and other processing techniques that improve accuracy.
Is there a difference between carrying a smartphone and carrying around a sign that says “Look at me! Look at me!” (assuming it’s on)?
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You can put the sign away.
Much harder to turn off the phone, sadly.
That was quick!
This story just broke last week and over the weekend a brand new privacy rights bill was introduced in Congress…
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So now there’s no need to ban TikTok. Its legal ability to collect and sell potentially identifying data will go away along with everyone else’s. Go, Near Intelligence! LOL!
So, Mr. Trump, who introduced you to your wife? Really? How old was she at the time?
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She was 17, nut it’s okay. That’s legal in New York, where Trump Towers is.
To play devil’s advocate, these companies do little more than compile and publish the modern equivalent of a phone book. Granularity or specificity of the date collection doesn’t change the nature of it. The acquired information and any content derivative of it is free speech. Any individual could accomplish similar results by scraping voting records and mugshot sites. The only foreseeable regulations that Congress is likely to pass would more likely than not hamper the rights of private citizens and internet journalists such as yourself. I fail to see how one could draw a line in a way, where the “solution” isn’t worse than status quo.
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The devil doesn’t need more advocates. There are plenty lobbying Congress already.
As for your actual assertions, they are laughably wrong. I could point you at specific things but there are so many, I’ll just point you to the EFF and ACLU in general for all the things we could do, legally, to make the situation much better without infringement on personal rights or making technology unusable.
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Just FYI, the phrase “devil’s advocate” means that you argue on behalf of the supposed bad guy. It does not, contrary to your apparent belief, mean “just make shit up in the hopes of annoying people”.
Glad I could help.
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Except that you can pay to have your details excluded from the phone book (go ex-directory). There’s no channel through which to pay data brokers to save them hoovering up your potentially personally identifying data and selling it on for more bucks than you could possibly afford to give them. See the difference yet?
First person who...
…ties the tracking on Epstein’s island to Prince Andrew’s and Donald Trump’s phones wins.