Yes, it’s another shocking revelation that makes you want to punch the wall or something. I guess it’s natural for news like these to come out after the NSA leak. These are just details that simply show how the United States was violating our privacy and the privacy of people in another country as well. 

In fact, I think we should get used to this kind of news. With the advancement in technology, something as massive like this is bound to come up. People are getting clever each day in finding ways to find other people. In this case, it’s just finding the exact locations of five billion other people.

Just imagine how much resource has been put into this cell phone location tracking scheme? You don’t just hire a few people to track five billion people. Even with the best data servers around, it would still require human intervention at some point. This means more human resources, and more costs, which in turn makes use of taxpayers’ money.

The Washington Post released a bunch of NSA de-classified documents that shows how they track the people of the United States and their specific locations. There were various documents along with PowerPoint presentations that evidently show how deep the well is. They have been analyzing, tracking, and downloading the exact locations of five billion people all across the globe in just a single day. I just have to emphasize that we’re not talking about a week, or even a month here. It’s all just for twenty- four hours. How can they just process that all in one day?

According to the release documents and slides, the program is called the CO-TRAVELER. This includes some analytic tools that identify location data by using the cell towers that are around the country. With the use of cables that connect the mobile networks all across the globe, this program can easily find your location in mere seconds. 

Of course, you can find corporations behind this massive location monitoring system. Don’t expect to find just a few people but most probably, big corporations. In the documents that were released by The Post, the corporations are identified as Artifice and Wolfpoint. These are code names that were also found in the Snowden documents when he first spoke up.

When simply thinking about it, that’s a total of 2 trillion people tracked each year. The main issue with location data is that you can’t hide it. By staying at a certain place with your cell phone turned on, you instantly send out your location to nearby cell towers and computers can easily pinpoint where you are.

If it makes you feel better, the NSA spoke up about this matter. They say that they are not storing all the data each day, but only 1 percent of it. You might think that 1 percent is not bad but did you know that it’s equal to 27 terabytes of information?

If you want the NSA out of your devices when you go online, you’ll need a good VPN provider. A virtual private network can help prevent anyone from tracking and monitoring your location and your online activities as well. Faceless.me can provide you with the security and the privacy you need in these days where the NSA has their eyes around.