The Seemingly Unanswerable Question: Can The Government Use Location Data To Hunt Us Down?

You remember Locationgate , right? It was that massive national scandal that left both Apple and Google at the center of our discontent, after two German researchers discovered that the iPhone tracks and stores location data automatically. The scandal has spurred numerous investigations into where we should draw the line when it comes to location tracking, and one in particular garnered the wisdom of the NSA’s Matthew Olsen, National Counterterrorism Center lead and NSA general counsel. At a confirmation hearing in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Olsen answered the question we had all been asking for a while: can the government use our location data to track us?