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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, 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.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(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.