Your Headphones Are Broadcasting Your Location

When social media became a big part of the way we communicate and the way we express ourselves in the early 2000s, there started to be these data brokers that began monitoring the social conversation. Governments also increasingly became interested in acquiring social media data and analyzing it and looking at people's connections with each other and who they talk to and what they say. Then there's location brokers. So these are brokers that started collecting information off of mobile phones. And then the weirdest kind of data I write about is what I call in the book gray data. You called it esoteric data, but you know, it is data that we do not normally associate with— we don't even really think about. It's this kind of weird digital exhaust. So I'm talking to you through a pair of Bluetooth headphones. Well, Bluetooth headphones are constantly pinging out a signal, and if you know how to collect that signal, you can say Byron's Bluetooth headphones were at this particular address.