Your phone is listening to you.. Understand.. without anyone knowing.. RTÉ Report

Tens or thousands or more of phone locations are up for sale in Ireland. Your phone is listening to you without you knowing. Understand, without anyone knowing.. There is a security concern in that. No one is safe. 

An undercover RTE Prime Time investigation has found that data showing the specific movements of tens of thousands of smartphones in Ireland is available for purchase from companies working in the digital marketing and advertising industries. This means that when you search, your phone is unknowingly detecting your online activity and turning it into data.   

The availability of data from brokers has raised major concerns about privacy and national and homeland security, including at the highest levels of the Justice Department, for 3 billion personal data.

Phones in the data can be tracked to specific residential addresses after entering sensitive locations such as high-security prisons, military bases, Leinster House, health clinics and mental health centres.

From the data, Prime Time was able to quickly identify the home addresses and lifestyles of specific individuals by examining the tracks of devices that entered certain locations and then returned to residential addresses.

The data showed the individuals' regular, precise movements, including the routes they took to and from Leinster House when they were at their local supermarket, the location of weekend activities, and the times they returned from home.

The data available for purchase shows the minute-by-minute movement of phones, while the locations provided are sufficient to show movement within home addresses and the lifestyles of the smartphone owner.

During an investigation into a group of journalists posing as the founders of a newly founded data analytics and marketing firm, Prime Time was given a large sample of what was available for purchase from a company for free.

The sample data included the movement of 64,000 phones in Ireland over a two-week period in April. The report, published by RTÉ, says the Prime Time team was secretly told that the data would be provided as a continuously updated feed, with a delay of 24 to 72 hours. 

Dr. Cathal Berry, former commander of the Irish Army Ranger Wing and military governor of Portlaoise Prison, the country's highest security prison, said: "There are some bad guys out there who are trying to take full advantage of this kind of information." "If people know where your home address is, you are at risk there from that perspective, especially if you are in a very senior position in the public service on the state side of the system."

The Prime Time investigation was conducted to examine the data and technology that underpins personalized online advertising and marketing, a long-standing concern of privacy rights activists. The type of data obtained is known as location or geospatial data. It is not the most commonly available data, but several companies have offered it. When asked about privacy concerns, vendors said there was no privacy violation because the phone's owner could not be identified. They also pointed out that smartphone owners would have given permission for location data to be sold through the terms and conditions of installed apps.

The companies trading the data have not identified which apps have collected the location information. 

After Prime Time was informed of the availability of the data, the Data Protection Commission said in a statement that it was "extremely concerned" that "information about an individual's location could pose a serious risk to their safety and well-being". 

"We are currently trying to identify the data broker in question and if they are based in Ireland, we will take action ourselves. However, if they are based in another EU country, we will contact the relevant data protection authority to deal with the matter," she said.

RTÉ Prime Time investigation uncovers location data of thousands of smartphones for sale in  Ireland