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Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They're Not Keeping It Secret (nytimes.com)
Dozens of companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds. They say it's anonymous, but the data shows how personal it is. From a report: The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails -- each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user. One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor of New York during the day and returns to Long Island at night. [...] An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times.
At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States -- about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times -- a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company -- reveals people's travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day.
At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States -- about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times -- a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company -- reveals people's travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day.
I recently visited a retirement home, for a community event which was held there. Nobody knew me there, and I didn't talk to or identify myself to anyone, I just listened. Shortly afterwards, I started seeing ads for the retirement home in my Android phone browser. I can only conclude that Google is sharing my GPS location with advertisers...
Most apps are complete shit whose sole purpose is to track you, show you ads, and sell the information about you.
If I install an app (very rare these days), if it asks for my contacts and my location information, I uninstall it.
The problem is every big company does this, think about PC games in the 90's vs now, when valve inserted the patch to take control of and steal half-life and CS and 2004. The reality is the internet has put an end to "the market" aka the private power model of western civilization is at odds with privacy and civil rights because the informed members of the public cannot protect themselves from these attacks, these companies control the infrastructure of society. What are you going to do when billion dollar mega corporation releases the new GTA online and because the game is targetted at kids, and those kids are computer illiterate, are going to buy a bugged piece of software that they don't own which is run from servers in Rockstars office? It's much too late young padawan.
Or now that microsoft has released "windows 10" as a service? We would need portal technology or ideological changes, because the only way you could modify the behavior of these companies is if you were physically two blocks away from their offices so theres a genuine fear from the customers storming your offices. You have no power in this relationship, the balance of power is all in favor of those who own the producive capacities of society because technology has overwhelmed any ability to hold them accountable, they can just run roughshod over the indebted masses with impunity.
The milton friedmanite idea we are "free to choose" is naive, the human mind did not evolve to perceive reality (see religion) nor make rational decisions in a high tech free market capitalist society.