Exactly! Never bring a smartphone to a protest and keep the dumb phone shut off, except if an emergency qualifies otherwise.

There are hundreds of reasons for not bringing a smartphone, not only the abuse of companies like Mobilewalla. Imagine if you happen to be close to a storefront that is vandalized or a statue that is brought down - cellphone data will make you a terrorist suspect! (At least in the current US).

More specifically, this undermines the stated justification for Mobilewalla's report. Which was to determine the amount of protestors who came from outside the cities they appeared in. If I'm the operator of a protests-as-a-service company the first thing I do is make sure none of the people have a cell phone that can be used to trace them back to me.

But that was the stated justification. The real purpose of the report is to advertise what Mobilewalla does. I consider this a form of profiteering.

If you assume that everyone has perfect Opsec, then there is now need for law enforcement at all, because all crime would be undetectable.

Why would you need to hide having participated in a protest? It is an act which is protected by the First Amendment in the US Constitution.

> It is an act which is protected by the First Amendment in the US Constitution.

Which is just a piece of paper. It has absolutely no power to protect you. Only a government that respects it can do that, and it's a certainty that our government will, from time to time, completely disregard that document when it feels the need to.

People have good rational reasons for hiding all sorts of legal activities they participate in.

Because law enforcement and the justicr system do not strictly obey the Constitution.

To put it another way: you can't rely on the Constitution to protect you during a protest against violations of the Constitution.

During Occupy I remember cops targeted a protester that had driven in on a company vehicle and told the company to get him fired.

The reality is that you night be illegally targeted and profiled based on data that is freely accessible. Robbery is illegal, yet it still makes sense to avoid behavior that can get you robbed.

To what end is the targeting and profiling illegal? Simply having publicly-available analyzed is not illegal.

It's not illegal (though unethical imho), it's the actions taken using that knowledge. Most effective if combined with parallel construction [1] that allow police to issue a trumped-up charge on a specific target.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Imagine attending a left leaning protest, having your participation recorded (unknowingly) forever by your phone, and then having a right wing, authoritarian government come to power and use that forever information to round up yourself and your friends.

Or imagine a left wing authoritarian government targeting lockdown protestors.

We should all be concerned about wanton data collection.