Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Thursday, December 19th, 2019.

I'm Brian McCullough. Today, that big New York Times piece about location data is Facebook taking another run at creating its own OS.

Is Apple considering buying James Bond?

Is Spotify building a social graph?

And do E-athletes need gaming socks.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The New York Times has a major piece up looking at a data set that it got its hands on

representing 50 billion cell phone location pings for more than 12 million Americans cell phones.

quote, each piece of the information in this file represents the precise location of a single

smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times

Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share

it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the

information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and

urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers." But as the Times itself pointed out, the data that it reviewed,

didn't come from a telecom or giant tech company, nor did it come from a

governmental surveillance operation.

It originated from a location data company.

One of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software slipped into mobile phone

apps.

You've probably never heard of most of the companies, and yet to anyone who has access to this

data your life is an open book.

They can see the places you go every moment of the day, whom you meet with or spend the night with, where you

pray, whether you visit a methadone clinic, a psychiatrist's office, or a massage parlor, end quote.

...