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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.
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.
If people would understand how much of their privacy they're giving up to asshole marketers, they'd be uninstalling this shit and realizing that most apps provide nothing that a web page can't give you.
I have very few apps on my phone, and have pretty much decided that most mobile apps are something I can live without.
I simply refuse to use location services, because the majority of that isn't going to benefit me, it's going to benefit some asshole ad company.
Fuck that, fuck apps, and fuck ad companies.
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...
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...
That's certainly a reasonable conclusion. On the other hand you don't have the evidence to rule out coincidence. It could be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc since we humans are wired to see patterns to the point we see them even when they don't actually exist. Don't get me wrong, I think you are likely correct but it's not a certainty.
I was in my home and in bed by 9. My apps are disappoint.
Remember when GPS chips started showing up in cell phones to "improve" our safety with 911 calls? There were a lot of privacy advocates that said it will undermine privacy and anonymity. Surprise! We were right. Now the FCC is mandating all cell phones beginning in 2019 to be privacy adverse. Better start leaving that addictive toy at home if you don't want Big Brother to watch over your shoulder. And pull the fuse on your Big Brother features on that new car too.
A few people have monitored what devices are doing while the user is actively using the device and while it is idle. They found that in some cases the device was sending back data anyway. Don't be too sure that you are in control of that OS. Do you have root? Can you uninstall any program? Are you sure that you are in control of your device?
I was basically going to say something similar but add that iOS only allows an app access to location service "while using the app", otherwise, permission is refused by default.
Apple are pathological about battery usage, and quite rightly also take privacy far more seriously than most other companies, thus the reason iOS allowed you control over apps well before Android starting implementing similar controls - minus Google services that is, because, you know, Google is All Knowing.
Google is contributing to the problem by requiring location services be turned on for a lot of bluetooth and Wifi Functions.
Google refused to explain this. It's only use is for evil otherwise the user could control the location more granularity.
When you go to install an app, you are told if it tracks your location. No one tries to hide the fact.
You get to choose whether or not to install apps that do this.
Yeah, and when you say don't share location information- it still does, just not with GPS. It uses for example Wifi signals in range to guess where you are.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I am surprised there aren't more comments on how this ties to political interference. Location matched with some basic demographics would be enough to target specific groups within our countries and things have gotten a lot more granular than that.
In the end it doesn't actually matter if Google or Facebook or iOS share the dataset if they are still sharing the ability to use it.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
But I don't trust Apple with my Location Data. Who's to say they are not collecting it and working with it nefariously themselves and simply superficiating authentic control over it not being gathered? Frankly there is just too much bad going on within these big companies for me to trust any of it.
If you don't trust Apple, who of all of the corporations at least appears to be trying to respect privacy, you can choose to not use a smartphone, or to have one that you only turn on when you want to make a call or access the Internet. If you need to be accessible by phone no matter where you are, you can choose to have a simple cellular phone that doesn't run apps, assuming that you trust that the cellular telephone company's tracking of your location by cell phone tower location isn't violating your privacy.
What appears to be impossible, without at least some level of trust, is to both enjoy the always-on connected feeling of having a smartphone AND the "only me and the people around me know where I am" feeling that used to be natural (unless you were a heinous criminal being tracked at great expense by law enforcement or a cheating spouse being tracked by a private detective hired by your better half). Welcome to the new age. At least the government hasn't mandated that everyone wear a tracking device at all times for "public safety reasons" (yet).
Postscript:
My post is not prescribing a defeatist stance. Rather, shotgun your defenses irrespective to known methods. Throw wrenches at the machines you see, then throw everything else for the ones you don't. Surveillance (benign or not) is not a binary condition; the goalpost is control, not extinction.
It doesn't matte whether you trust Apple or Samsung or whomever, Until the cell phone companies are prohibitted from monitizing you location data, they'll still be the premier source of data about you.
How would my apps know where I was?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Google is contributing to the problem by requiring location services be turned on for a lot of bluetooth and Wifi Functions.
I normally have location services turned off, and nothing on my phone has ever asked for them to be on besides Google Maps. Bluetooth and Wifi work just fine without them.
people just don't care.
we are the minority of people who care about all these privacy violations.
i hardly have any apps on my phone, just because i can't trust 99.99999% of them, but the rest of the world is happy to install whatever stupid app they find in the store (or even outside the store, found on shady websites).
complain about privacy? never!
but they do complain about battery life (go figure), well guess why your battery life suck.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.