You can help The Markup find the sleazy companies that secretly sell your location data

The Markup is a nonprofit newsroom with a mission to understand and expose powerful entities are using technology in ways that hurt society. It recently investigated the $12 billion market for phone location data. It "identified 47 companies that play one of the many roles in the location data pipeline: providers, buyers, sellers, and aggregators."

Now The Markup is asking for your help in finding these secretive companies that get rich tracking you and selling your personal data. The next time your phone displays a pop-up asking if you want to allow an app to track you, take a screenshot and send it to The Markup.

From the site:

After looking through dozens of companies' websites and privacy policies, we found a lack of transparency about the origin of the data that fuels their businesses. Buried in privacy policies, you will find lots of mentions of "trusted data partners," but one thing was missing in nearly all of the sites we looked at: the names of the mobile apps that actually collect your location and movement data. 

Some of the companies we looked at told The Markup that they don't publicly disclose what apps they get location data from, in order to keep a competitive advantage, but maintained that their process of obtaining location data was transparent and with clear consent from app users.