Much of the public's understanding of cell phone tracking has centered around the cell provider, the telephone network, and big players like Facebook and Google. They're missing a big piece. The NYT is shedding light on this missing piece.

This article puts the spotlight on yet another group of companies and another tracking mechanism. These companies are small, virtually unknown to the public, and they're providing SDKs which others are building real and useful mobile apps upon. One example given was an otherwise legitimate weather app which pulls your location to provide local weather data. You grant the app access to your location information because it has a reason to have it, and it does something useful with the data.

The article introduces the public to what you probably already knew. Those SDKs can (and do) ingest that same location data for their own purposes. In the article, they find that the SDK provides your fine location data to a location services company (Cuebiq) for a total of twenty times over the course of an eight minute walk. Most users have no idea this is going on behind the scenes. They just see the weather app.

The article isn't attempting to dismiss other forms of tracking. It is trying to better introduce a new form of tracking that most people poorly understand, if at all.