Charlie Warzel

Granular surveillance is still new. But some experts argue the window to define our cultural values around tracking citizens may be closing. In the United States, and across the world, any protester who brings a phone to a public demonstration is tracked and that person’s presence at the event is duly recorded in commercial datasets. At the same time, political parties are beginning to collect and purchase phone location for voter persuasion.

The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country.

Just days before heading to a West Wing job, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was secretly engaged in talks to sell his struggling news organization, the New York Observer, to Clinton megadonor and Univision chair Haim Saban and Hillary Clinton ally David Brock — a progressive media figure with aspirations to turn the news outlet into “the Breitbart of the left.” After the 2016 election, Kushner and Observer Media chair Joseph Meyer reportedly sought to offload the paper to Trump allies, including American Media, the parent company of the National Enquirer, one of the media publica