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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!"
(Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Monday February 11 2019, @11:42PM
Shoshana Zuboff's [wikipedia.org] book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism [theguardian.com] discusses just how much your data is being (mis)used by an increasingly broad set of corporations in more industries than you might imagine.
You can find an overview of the concepts here [wikipedia.org], and if you don't want to read the book, you can see the author discussing her work here [c-span.org].
Make no mistake, the corporate collection, analysis and dissemination of our personal data is not only big business, it is a threat to our liberty.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr