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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the but-not-what-I-did dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night, and They're Not Keeping It Secret

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.

These companies sell, use or analyze the data to cater to advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds seeking insights into consumer behavior. It’s a hot market, with sales of location-targeted advertising reaching an estimated $21 billion this year. IBM has gotten into the industry, with its purchase of the Weather Channel’s apps. The social network Foursquare remade itself as a location marketing company. Prominent investors in location start-ups include Goldman Sachs and Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder.

Businesses say their interest is in the patterns, not the identities, that the data reveals about consumers. They note that the information apps collect is tied not to someone’s name or phone number but to a unique ID. But those with access to the raw data — including employees or clients — could still identify a person without consent. They could follow someone they knew, by pinpointing a phone that regularly spent time at that person’s home address. Or, working in reverse, they could attach a name to an anonymous dot, by seeing where the device spent nights and using public records to figure out who lived there.

Many location companies say that when phone users enable location services, their data is fair game. But, The Times found, the explanations people see when prompted to give permission are often incomplete or misleading. An app may tell users that granting access to their location will help them get traffic information, but not mention that the data will be shared and sold. That disclosure is often buried in a vague privacy policy.

“Location information can reveal some of the most intimate details of a person’s life — whether you’ve visited a psychiatrist, whether you went to an A.A. meeting, who you might date,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who has proposed bills to limit the collection and sale of such data, which are largely unregulated in the United States.

“It’s not right to have consumers kept in the dark about how their data is sold and shared and then leave them unable to do anything about it,” he added.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:00PM (6 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:00PM (#772906)

    Problem is consumers WANT to be in the dark.

    This is why I respect Google for providing relatively open, in-your-face, straightforward reporting of the information they keep on you, for instance from here:

    https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout?pli=1 [google.com]

    Far better to educate everyone on what is collected than to keep it under wraps.

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  • (Score: 1) by DeVilla on Thursday December 13 2018, @04:36PM (5 children)

    by DeVilla (5354) on Thursday December 13 2018, @04:36PM (#774012)

    That site's pretty awesome. Which one of those options contains the ad tracking info?

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 13 2018, @07:51PM (4 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday December 13 2018, @07:51PM (#774101)

      Which one of those options contains the ad tracking info?

      In a sense, all of them. They use your location, optionally: e-mail contents, search history, etc. to determine what ads to show you. They probably also track which ads they have shown you, or maybe not... could run that part of the algorithm open-loop. They definitely track ad view statistics for Google Pay and AdWords.

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      • (Score: 1) by DeVilla on Thursday December 13 2018, @08:14PM (3 children)

        by DeVilla (5354) on Thursday December 13 2018, @08:14PM (#774113)

        Right. Where's the "open and in my face" display of my ad view statistics? And the ones I may have clicked on?

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 13 2018, @10:09PM (2 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday December 13 2018, @10:09PM (#774170)

          For me, it's pretty in-my-face when a page displays something like: "Ad by Google" - also, when I type an e-mail with some obscure keywords in it and a corresponding ad shows up 5 minutes later on some site I'm browsing, that's not subtle at all.

          I suppose if you're worried about tracking of which ads you click on, you should use incognito mode, and possibly a TOR gateway if you're truly paranoid. Personally, I just don't click on ads that I don't want 'people' thinking I clicked on them.

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          • (Score: 1) by DeVilla on Thursday December 13 2018, @11:44PM (1 child)

            by DeVilla (5354) on Thursday December 13 2018, @11:44PM (#774197)

            I'm not necessarily saying I'm worried about anything. You said they provide an

            open, in-your-face, straightforward reporting of the information they keep on you

            and gave a link. It's cool. I just thought it looked incomplete. I guess no one said they gave a complete reporting.

            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday December 14 2018, @12:41AM

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday December 14 2018, @12:41AM (#774210)

              You're right, it's not EVERYTHING.

              On the other hand, I think if you took 100 randomly selected smartphone users and showed them this page of info about them, about 90 of them would totally freak out at the amount of stuff that's just listed there.

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