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posted by martyb on Monday February 11 2019, @09:53PM   Printer-friendly

Phys.org:

Sixty-seven percent of smartphone users rely on Google Maps to help them get to where they are going quickly and efficiently.
A major of[sic] feature of Google Maps is its ability to predict how long different navigation routes will take. That's possible because the mobile phone of each person using Google Maps sends data about its location and speed back to Google's servers, where it is analyzed to generate new data about traffic conditions.

Information like this is useful for navigation. But the exact same data that is used to predict traffic patterns can also be used to predict other kinds of information – information people might not be comfortable with revealing.

For example, data about a mobile phone's past location and movement patterns can be used to predict where a person lives, who their employer is, where they attend religious services and the age range of their children based on where they drop them off for school.

Perhaps we can carefully craft our data patterns to tell advertisers, "Take a hike!"


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @10:10PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 11 2019, @10:10PM (#799776)

    Whole world is fucked up. There's only one (or two) questions. What are you doing about it? What can one do?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @12:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 12 2019, @12:07PM (#800032)

    The answer is obvious, I do anything and everything in my power to oppose the surveillance capitalism. This includes running only free software on your computers, starting from operating systems (Linux, BSD) and applications as well and not using the services of companies, such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple. It also means actively blocking 3rd party content while web browsing, using a whitelist (say uMatrix). And outside of the browser having a hosts file will not hurt you but this is a blacklist, so it's a weak protection against the millions of actively hostile domains out there.

    People are so busy they don't even realize they're getting raped in bright daylight. And that they're complicit in fucking their friends, relatives, associates and family members in the process as well. It's a horrible reality we live in today. The totalitarian state is closer than even: KGB, Hoover's FBI and Stasi for example had only a small fraction of the spy powers of the current spy corporations. The whole world indeed is well fucked. But we must try to resist and fix it. Because who if not us? When if not now?