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Pillar has not explained how it accessed Burrill’s location data except to say that it “was obtained from a data vendor and authenticated by an independent data consulting firm contracted by The Pillar.” The news site did not identify the vendor or say whether it paid for the information.

Grindr, which was fined $11.7 million in January by Norwegian officials for sharing details about its users with advertising companies, initially denied it was even possible for such data to become public, saying in a statement that the incident was “infeasible from a technical standpoint and incredibly unlikely to occur." Grindr updated its statement on Wednesday to say, “We do not believe Grindr is the source of the data” and claimed the “pieces simply do not add up.”

But experts on data privacy say it is completely plausible to buy anonymous location data from third-party data brokers and use additional information like a person’s home and work address to de-anonymize it.

“This data that’s collected today could be used against us in ways that we can’t even imagine,” said Patrick Jackson, chief technology officer of the privacy-protection firm Disconnect. “A year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now.”

Apps still regularly share data including location histories and demographic information with data brokers and marketing companies, claiming that it isn’t tied to any one person’s identity. Privacy experts have long warned that those protections are flimsy at best, but until now there hasn’t been a public example of someone weaponizing an individual’s cellphone data in this way.

“If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that this is exactly what we’ve been warning about and it shows just how easy this is to do,” said Bennett Cyphers, a researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If it can happen to this guy, it can happen to anyone.”

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Berg told The Pillar that “according to canon law and the Church’s tradition, clerics are obliged to observe ‘perfect and perpetual continence,’ as a reflection of what should be our lived pursuit of our spousal relationship with the Church and with Christ.”

Calling it “obviously a scandal” that a cleric would use location-based hookup apps, Berg said there is “a real disconnect between the appearance of a man who presumably is earnestly striving to live the life of chastity, when it becomes glaringly evident that he is dramatically failing at that because he’s gone to hookup apps to look actively for sexual partners — that itself is an enormous scandal.”

In his experience in formation and religious life, Berg said that “when it becomes evident that a cleric is regularly and glaringly failing to live continence,” that can become “only a step away from sexual predation.”

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Originally posted by Amanda:
Say, any of you find you're receiving long fine-print contracts from big corporations outlining their present privacy rules and regs (for anyone with nothing better to do than read them)? I'm even getting them from relatively small scale operations - e.g., one of our local medical corporations.

Sure, that's not an innovation, but now there's a real flood of them. What's with that?

For the record: America's data harvesting industry

(Have any of you followed the horrifying you-tube video about Jeff Bezos? After analyzing how he got where he is, the final message is that he's now continuing his power growth way beyond Amazon - and entirely because of the power he's amassed from....DATA! Gave me shivers. One of those things we see in the rear-view mirror. as patently clear - but to which we're blind at the time. The newest path to Caesarhood.)