Whoops: Data Broker Data Reveals Rich Visitors To Jeffrey Epstein’s Island
You might recall that, back in February, Senator Ron Wyden's office revealed how a data broker named Near Intelligence had collected the data of women visiting abortion clinics, then sold that data (via a proxy) to right wing activists. Those activists then turned around and used it to target vulnerable women with health care misinformation.
The scandal perfectly exemplified the very real hazards of having a Congress that's too corrupt to regulate data brokers or pass even a basic internet-era privacy law.
When it originally went public, Near bragged about how they owned a database tracking the movement and online behavior of1.6 billion people across 44 countries. That company ultimately went bankrupt, resulting in a rush by Wyden and the FTC to ensure that data didn't bounce around the open web.
But the data broker's impact lives on all the same. As part of an exclusive report (paywalled, Quartz alternative) Wired found datasets (left exposed online) collected by the company that tracked visitors to Jeffrey Epstein's notorious pervert island down to the centimeter. The data exposes the movement patterns gleaned from 200 mobile devices across 11,279 coordinates as they visited the island:
The coordinates that Near Intelligence collected and left exposed online pinpoint locations to within a few centimeters of space. Visitors were tracked as they moved from the Ritz-Carlton on neighboring St. Thomas Island...The tracking continued after they arrived. From inside Epstein's enigmaticwaterfront templeto the pristine beaches, pools, and cabanas scattered across his 71-acres of prime archipelagic real estate."
The Wired report notes that the data on Epstein's guests was created by an unknown third-party client using a free trial of Near's systems. Those systems are based on an intelligence platform formerly known as Vista (since folded into a product called Pinnacle). And again, Wired kind of buries the lede: that the data was found openly accessible online.
WIRED discovered several so-called Vista reports while examining Pinnacle's publicly accessible code. While the specific URLs for the reports are difficult to find, Google's web crawlers were able to locate at least two other publicly accessible Vista reports: one geofencing the Westfield Mall of the Netherlands and another targeting Saipan-Ledo Park in El Paso, Texas."
It's not hard to see the problem with dodgy international companies tracking granular, detailed online behavior down to the centimeter, then failing to secure that data as part of a massive market economy that sees very little oversight. It makes the hysteria surrounding TikTok seem laughable, yet mysteriously gets far less press and regulatory attention because U.S. profits are involved.
In this case the data revealed the dodgy behavior of pedophile shitheads; but the data could just as easily have included any manner of easily abused and exploited sensitive user data, including that of marginalized folks.
Half of the companies involved in tracking this data have since been acquired or changed their names - all part of the intentionally convoluted industry specifically designed to make oversight and regulation as difficult as possible. Near Intelligence has since been reincorporated and rebranded as Azira.
Outside of scattered FTC action, the U.S. doesn't even try to ethically rein in this sector for two reasons: one, Congress is too corrupt to resist the advances of a coalition of massive companies with unlimited lobbying budgets, keen to see the data monetization party continue. Two: the U.S. government also exploits this lack of oversight to hoover up data itself and, in many cases, avoid getting traditional warrants.
This kind of data isn't just valuable to marketers. It's valuable to city planners, sociologists, and traffic management firms. It's super valuable to military contractors and the military. But it's also hugely beneficial to global governments (including authoritarian ones), and I'd wager the intelligence systems they've built to exploit it make Edward Snowden-era surveillance look downright adorable.
There's no financial incentive for anyone involved in this chain of dysfunction to behave ethically or implement reform. And the scale at which this dysfunction now operates is mind boggling.
So despite endless scandal, this data surveillance free-for-all continues unabated. At least until there's a scandal so ugly (likely involving mass fatalities, some unprecedented embarrassment for the rich and powerful, or both) that Congress is shaken from its corrupt apathy and forced to pass some kind of basic guardrails.