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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday December 11 2018, @01:54PM (15 children)
To be true they might know where my phone was last night, which may or may not be at the same location I was at. Since contrary to common beliefs, or their ideas, I can apparently actually put my phone in one location and then leave it there. It must be really confusing for them since if you have more then one phone (say a work phone and a private phone and possibly a third burner phone for all your shady business) it could become weird from a data perspective -- the subject was either pulling an all-nighter at work, at home or at some other third location. I guess if one of the phones is moving it's a fair bet someone is with that phone at that particular time. Still it seems like shit data and I don't really know who would like to pay for information like that.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:17PM (8 children)
Which is exactly why there is such a large push to make people get rid of proper landlines. Communicate only with your One True Device, keep all your data on it, and take it everywhere, because you NEED it, we promise!
Problem is consumers WANT to be in the dark. Or more accurately, the blinding bliss from staring directly in to burn-out-your-retina blue LEDs.
"Don't forget to download our FREE weather and news app/malware! You need INSTANT updates when something happens! Really! You NEED it! You WAAAANT it! You MUSSSST have it!"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:00PM (6 children)
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Thursday December 13 2018, @04:36PM (5 children)
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)
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Thursday December 13 2018, @08:14PM (3 children)
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)
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Thursday December 13 2018, @11:44PM (1 child)
I'm not necessarily saying I'm worried about anything. You said they provide an
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
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:32PM
"Communicate only with your One True Device"
The phone companies call it "My precious....AAAHHHHH!!!!!, give me my precious you nasty, wormy hobbitses"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 11 2018, @03:57PM
Your local cocaine dealer would like to know when you visit his strip clubs...
Sure, you leave your phone home sometimes, but when your phone goes to the strip club, who do we think took it there?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Tuesday December 11 2018, @07:49PM (4 children)
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
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:20PM (3 children)
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)
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
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
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:41PM (2 children)
Yes, the EU agrees on that, that's why they created the GDPR. It does exactly that, make sure the users are informed and give them options to deal with it. (Which mostly boils down to, not using that app.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:37PM (1 child)
So, yeah, it really isn't all that different.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @07:38PM
I get what you're saying, but forcing companies to reveal the data they collect seems like a very good difference to me.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday December 11 2018, @02:50PM
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 11 2018, @03:37PM (1 child)
Imagine that.
I may blow some minds here. I do advocate for open source software. Free beer, free libre, free, free, free. I believe in some other things, like file sharing, that some of our more capitalistic members hate. I believe that copyright law needs to be chopped back to ten or fifteen years. I could go on - I don't really believe in all the "rights" that "rights holders" are claiming today.
But, a lot of the people who believe as I do are just plain DUMB!! They see the advertisement, "Free Download, install today, let us make your life easier!" But, that shit ain't open source. Looks free, they don't want any cash money up front, right? But, HEY STUPID!! IT AIN'T FREE!! The guy(s) and gal(s) who write those apps are trying to get rich. And, they'll sell every soul they can get their grimy hooks into to get the cash rolling.
Pretty much all open source is libre, and pretty much all open source is gratis. Closed source is closed for a reason. Few people are willing to work for free. I don't work for free, do you? How many people do you know who work for free? If you know a lot of them, let me know, 'cause I have some work I'd like to have done, that I don't really want to pay for.
Just think, people. All those apps are meant to make somebody some money. If Jack and Jill Developer aren't charging you anything (up front) then how are they making money? FFS, look at the fine print. Many, if not most, tell you that they're harvesting your data. Read the fine print.
Yeah, I believe in free software. But read the contract you are signing before you sign. If you can't read, then have someone who can read it for you.
Let me give you a hint. Microsoft and Google are not your friends. Linus is your friend. Apple - - - is a better friend than the first two, IMO, but nowhere near as good a friend as Linus. (Apple takes a rather exorbitant price up front, but they don't sneak around behind your back like those first two.) Read the contracts.
Those snooping apps? If you're dumb enough to install that crap without any investigation at all - well - you pretty much deserve whatever. If you install that crap, and you expect to keep any kind of secrets, you're an idiot. It's really that plain, and that simple.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:38PM
Mah hero!....in a manly way.
:|
:)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 11 2018, @03:41PM (10 children)
My apps think I never leave home. The ones I allow to touch location data anyway. This isn't your garden variety privacy concern, mind you. Let any old chucklehead know where your best fishing holes are and you end up having to share.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:03PM (4 children)
According to Google Takeout, their tracking data is so coarse and inaccurate that anybody trying to find fishing spots using it is going to have a bad time.
We went sailing for 6 hours the other day, according to Google location tracking we traveled 60 miles in those 6 hours, in a boat with a hull speed of 6 knots - and we spent a couple of hours drifting around going nowhere...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 11 2018, @06:38PM (3 children)
Did you know there are actually people who would call that wasted time? Idiots.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday December 11 2018, @08:54PM (2 children)
I'm coming to the conclusion that travel, whether at 550mph at 30,000 feet, or at 5 knots at sea level, is travel - and being on our own boat, not crammed into a human filled sardine can with exotic diseases collected from around the globe is usually a lot more pleasant. We've lived in "vacation destination for the western world, Florida" forever, why would we pay a bunch of money and deal with all the airport/ground transport/hotel hassle to leave?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Wednesday December 12 2018, @03:27AM (1 child)
Let's see...
Red Tide?
Hurricane?
Too many old people?
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 12 2018, @09:33PM
Florida: the advanced course.
Red tide used to be a southwest coast thing only for a little while in the summers - thanks to the current water temperature levels, it is lasting much longer with a much wider range. Growing up, we'd just not go to the beaches when red tide was in. Today, I live toward the North end of the state and so we don't go out of our way to go to places where it is, when it is.
Hurricane - far preferable to earthquakes and/or tsunami, or blizzard. Days to weeks of advanced notice, everyone understands why you're taking off work/leaving with minimal notice, 95% of the time all the preparation is for nothing. We've had 3 significant storms actually hit us in Florida the last 40 years, Andrew was a bad one, but Irma and Matthew were a night of wind and a few days without power. When we lived in Houston (for less than 3 years), we were in the Rita evacuation - and that's what sucks, when your house is forecast to be underwater due to storm surge. Solution: have a house out of the storm surge zone.
Too many old people - this was Manatee County when I was a kid, highest death rate per capita in the nation: old age. That was a town where not only would one old geezer pull out right in front of you on a 50mph road doing 5mph, two of them would - one from each side - blocking both lanes, forcing a hard braking slow from 50mph to 5, and after they realized what they had done they would both cackle with glee and continue down the road at 8mph for the next mile, creating a huge backup. Solution: go somewhere that isn't Naples, Sarasota, Bradenton, Century City, and the other walking dead zones. P.S. the old people are worse than just being blind, deaf, and physically incapable of holding their heads high enough to see over the steering wheel - the slightly younger ones get together and pass local ordinances to thwart just about anything that looks like young people having a good time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:41PM (1 child)
My favorites are the ones who think app permissions are the only gateway to being tracked. And not shit like "free wifi", the cell phone network itself, built in apps that you never use(yeah the facebook app you never signed into that your provider stuck on your phone for convenience still tracks you), digital assistants, and more.
And even if you nail all that down, you're still basically just trusting apple or google to not lie about what your base tracking settings mean.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 11 2018, @06:36PM
No, the only thing I'm trusting is that my cell provider isn't putting my triangulated location data up on a public page. There's fuck all you can do about your provider but the rest you can entirely control when you've got an opensource OS on your phone and compile yourself instead of trusting someone else's binaries.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Tuesday December 11 2018, @08:15PM (1 child)
The problem isn't with one or two apps, it is the whole app eco-system.
All it takes is one app with location permissions... Perhaps a weather app, after all, what good is weather if it doesn't know where you are located. And the thinking is how can one app matter.... it is not like everyone knows where you are located... or do they?
The issue is that the weather app is created with the FCKTHS software development framework. Well, you realize that the weather app devs know your location, but the framework pings back to itself the location also. It also sends information including your unique phone id. (not necessarily the phone number, but the unique phone id.)
But you say, "thats ok, its only one app." Well, a thousand other apps also use the FCKTHS framework. They may not have location data but they send back your phone id along with any other information they want to grab from your phone. The SDK makers tie the unique ids together and all of a sudden, apps that do not know your location suddenly figure it out. And when the framework devs start selling your data, you realize why the SDKs are often free and how they afford to host and promote their SDK to every other developer under the sun.
To make matters worse, most apps don't use a single SDK, they use more like 2 dozen each. And no one cares about your privacy.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 12 2018, @03:16AM
Someone should really expound on that concept. Fine-grained permissions, they say. Does the NSA respect those permissions? Does your telco? How about the manufacturer? Does Google respect those permissions?
Let's pretend for a moment that none of the above really matters. As you point out, there are tricks to get around a denial of permission. The only person who thinks your phone belongs to you, and to you alone, is the sucker who paid for the phone. No one else believes it.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:01PM
You have apps? I don't use anything like that, or have my phone setup. I removed and deleted just about everything I could, and like you, I don't take it anywhere sensitive anyways. I never take pictures with it either. It's a burner phone.
The only apps that access to sensitive data are FOSS apps that I'm pretty sure are not phoning home and sharing that data, much less running on freaking Android or iOS.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday December 11 2018, @06:54PM (3 children)
That's why I turn off my phone when I visit my local legal pot store. I also use the car that doesn't have location tracking.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by TheFool on Tuesday December 11 2018, @08:02PM (2 children)
And you pop the battery out to make sure it's off, right?
Because if you can't do that, you're really best just leaving it home.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday December 11 2018, @08:07PM
Battery??! What about the SECOND battery??!!!
Joking aside, you could put it in "airplane mode", turn it off, and then wrap the phone in a sleeve aluminum foil, which should kill the signal(s).
X years from now, maybe we will have neutrino routers in every computing device phoning home using a backup battery.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday December 11 2018, @08:23PM
I'm not worried about the NSA tracking me, so no: I don't remove the battery.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by TheFool on Tuesday December 11 2018, @08:19PM (1 child)
For about 340 days of the year, I spend my nights at home. The other 25 or so, I leave while my phone spends the night at home. It's not very interesting data.
The only thing they might mine out of that would be that I have no friends. That's probably a useful statistic in some academic study somewhere, but not something people would really pay for. Although, if they are turning on the mic without my knowledge, they can probably learn a lot more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 11 2018, @09:43PM
Yet somewhere a marketing droid reading that is getting a hard-on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @09:44AM
So now we are going to find out that all those nights Snow claimed he was "getting some" he was actually sitting home with the wife and kid? Kind of like Walter Mitty?