"In most cases, ascertaining a home location and an office location was enough to identify a person. Consider your daily commute: Would any other smartphone travel directly between your house and your office every day?"
Then they back it up with:
"With the help of publicly available information, like home addresses, we easily identified and then tracked scores of notables."
And provided the specific example of Mary Millben.
It was manual and not automated, but the tech details of finding work and home addresses, based on the two most visited spots, seems not novel. Similar for extrapolating that into a name.
Do some patent searches for the companies pioneering the technology. Read their white papers. You can begin to assemble an idea of how they do it. It’s not entirely revealing and is very tedious. But you can connect the dots. NYT is somewhat half-hearted when it’s not a political subject.
"In most cases, ascertaining a home location and an office location was enough to identify a person. Consider your daily commute: Would any other smartphone travel directly between your house and your office every day?"
Then they back it up with:
"With the help of publicly available information, like home addresses, we easily identified and then tracked scores of notables."
And provided the specific example of Mary Millben.
It was manual and not automated, but the tech details of finding work and home addresses, based on the two most visited spots, seems not novel. Similar for extrapolating that into a name.