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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: 2) by stretch611 on Tuesday December 11 2018, @07:49PM (4 children)

    by stretch611 (6199) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @07:49PM (#773034)

    Of course, one of the things they want to know is your home address. So leaving it home is a good thing for them. And unless you leave it some place different every night, they will learn your home address.

    The advertisers get your home address and they use public records to tie a name to the phone. And all the advertisements are tied to the account. Between the apps used, which stores and places you visit. hospitals, clinics, bars, stores, and which extremist groups you like on the social networks, all your actions join their big database. They start building a profile on you and everyone else in the neighborhood. Even if you block your location access, even if you shun facebook and all the other social networks, you are one in a thousand. All of your neighbors have their information tossed in a database.

    All that information is used against you... whether it is politicos who hire research firms to gerrymander districts, or Megacorps using "PR Firms" to determine which communities would ignore glowing green ooze coming out of pipes, the big data pool isn't being used for your benefit, but theirs.

    Am I being paranoid? Is this far-fetched? I highly doubt it. They way this world is shaping up, I am probably only scratching a tiny bit of the surface.

    --
    Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:20PM (3 children)

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:20PM (#773090)

    Heh, that's even funnier. Where I live, nobody, not even government, knows about it. Anything associated with the address is going to be associated with the property owner, not me. There are no records of any kind that have my name attached to that property. Not even pizza delivery, and for that, I use a fake Eat24 account and pay cash. I also don't have a contract, which means it is very good that I have a great relationship with the property owner. I provide Internet via another company to the property, and then VPN tunnel all that traffic to an exit point in a data center. Where I work, there is no cell signal. Phone calls and text messages fail to reach my phone and it indicates no service. No biggie, since I'm using VoIP and routing that out in interesting ways.

    I'm registered to vote, but use cross streets to indicate my voting "precinct" or whatever. So I'm actually registered as homeless with the state of California. Additionally, I completely and wholly let my credit go. No reason to play that game when the big players have zero consequences for bad actions. I walked away from well over 200,000 in credit card debt with my finger extended after Wall Street got bailed out. That means, my credit report is infected with fraud again and I love it. So difficult to figure out who might be the real guy, and who is fraud. Even better, my age range goes from 28 to 64, depending on which of the three credit bureaus you ask. Searching in a specific way leads to an obituary :)

    Try pulling a report on me, from any direction, and you grab multiple people and conflicting information from disparate databases. I check Google and a couple of places that claim to be able to perform background checks on me, and it's all garbage.

    You're not paranoid, but you're also underestimating the value of Bayesian Poisoning. Embrace the tracking from multiple directions, corrupt the data, wash, rinse, repeat. It's not easy, but it's worth it. I'll be moving out of the US soon anyways, and when I come back and visit it will be at other people's places. Barring that, I'm thinking of getting a small RV and moving to some place where I can access tall geography, like being in a valley, or bowl. Why? I can mount a pair of radios and shunt all my traffic, including phones, across a 15-20 mile data link.

    Go mobile, lie on all government forms, and live in a permanent state of obfuscation. It's not really all that hard. I've been doing it for decades.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 2) by stretch611 on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:55PM (1 child)

      by stretch611 (6199) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:55PM (#773120)

      Embrace the tracking from multiple directions, corrupt the data, wash, rinse, repeat. It's not easy, but it's worth it.

      I wish that there was a open source version of Android (like Cyanamod and others) that would do this. I would install a ROM to my phone immediately if I found one that actually gave fake location data to apps that I specify. Especially if the data was so bad that it showed me on the east coast one hour, and the west coast the next hour, after sleeping in the Arctic Circle.

      --
      Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday December 11 2018, @11:01PM

        by edIII (791) on Tuesday December 11 2018, @11:01PM (#773164)

        Not the biggest problem. The wireless carriers are gathering location information themselves, from the towers, in accordance with e911 laws, in five second increments. About as often as your phone polls the cell tower, there is a location record attached to your account in their databases. Verizon admitted they keep the data for years, and you know the NSA has that too.

        You have to fight that by using burner phones, use them for a period of time, then give them to the homeless with something like 60 days worth of credit. That's about the most you can do to mix that dataset up, and it still involves running no apps on your phone.

        The cellphone is the #1 offender for citizen privacy. Wish I could get groups of people together to exchange their phones, but that won't happen. My hope is that Purism gets the Librephone up and running, and that has a completely isolated cellular radio that can be removed. Hardware switches for everything else. If the cellular radio can be removed easily, then we should be exchanging on our cellar radios as often as possible with friends, families, co-workers. THAT would start some serious poisoning of the location data, while not actually affecting the ability of e911 services to isolate you if you needed help.

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @11:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @11:49PM (#773187)

      The real fun part will be when you come back to the United States and the government doesn't find the data on you that they're expecting to. For that matter, when you try to leave the country on your passport that may trip you up also. Either way, you will become a person of interest because you're not leaving the traces that are expected of you.