In July 2021, a senior U.S. Catholic Church official resigned when he learned that a newsletter was about to publish a detailed record of his movements—where he slept, which bars he visited, which apps he used. No government was involved. No wiretap order. No subpoena.
A conservative Catholic news site appeared to have acquired all these records through an advertising broker linked to Grindr, the gay dating app. And it’s not just hookup apps. Virtually every app we use collects data that can get leaked in unexpected ways. The Strava cycling and running app has been used to locate military bases (and just weeks ago, the location of a French aircraft carrier). And then there is spyware, software designed to illicitly extract data, like the Pegasus tools used to surveil Mexico’s opposition politicians and journalists.
It’s all part of the shadowy data industrial complex that exists in the 21st century world of apps and smartphones. That world exists to a large extent because one device enabled it: the iPhone.
Apple didn’t build this surveillance economy. But it built the platform on which the surveillance economy runs, often taking a 30 percent cut of its revenue through the App Store. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007—and the steady improvement, from the addition of GPS in the next model to the current panoply of sensors and features—set the stage for the world of tracking we live in now.
