Your smartphone is probably being tracked&8212;and it's not hard to figure out who you are

There's an entire industry that revolves around tracking people's movements via their smartphones and selling that data to third parties. It's legal (in the U.S.), it isn't particularly hard to do, and while the data is supposed to be anonymized, it's often easy to connect it to a real person. 

For smartphone owners, this is very tough to avoid, especially for a non-technical user. If you own a smartphone, you're probably one of many dots on a map, stored on a server of a company you likely never heard of. 

This is according to a new analysis by The New York Times, which examined a data file containing 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in the U.S. The data file, which the NYT claims is "by far the largest" ever reviewed by journalists, has been provided by anonymous sources, and it does not belong to the government or a telecom company.  Read more...