Pandemic dashboards exposed a hidden ecosystem of location tracking.
During the pandemic, many companies created dashboards showing aggregated movement data. This revealed that smaller companies like Unacast and Placer.ai gathered location information via hundreds of apps on your phone. Additionally, phone companies Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon sold our location data. There is an entire ecosystem of apps that share a lot of information about us. WhatsApp is probably not the biggest privacy offender we have in our phones when you consider this broader data sharing landscape.
— WhatsApp: We Should Discuss What Our Data Is Used For, Not Who Has It · Forbes