Do you have a smart phone? It’s probably smarter then you think. According to a New York Times story published this week your phone is probably recording your where abouts hundreds or even thousands of times every day.
Maybe you don’t care.
But a school teacher that the Times wrote about did care.
“An app on the device (her phone) gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times,” the Times wrote about the school teacher.
The Time bought the information on the school teacher from a company that gathers location information from phones and the apps on phones. At first the data was anonymous but the newspaper was easily able to connect a name to the data.
The data showed the school teachers location was recorded on average once every twenty-one minutes. It tracked her to the gym, to the airport, to a doctors appointment, to a Weight Watcher’s meeting, to an over night at her ex-boyfriends apartment, and of course her classroom.
The Times chose to identify the school teacher, and easily did so, for purposes of their article. They also tracked phones whose movements strongly suggested they were being used by the President of the United States, the Mayor of New York, and a group of forty school children. The actual identities of the owners of those phones could also have been easily established.
“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,” the newspaper wrote.
You may be able to turn off the location finder on an app but, as an Associated Press report last August showed, that may not be good enough.
“An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so,” the AP wrote.
The tracking data can be used for more then just selling you advertising, according to the New York Times.
“. . . 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,” the Times wrote.
“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, told the Times.
Wyden has proposed bills to limit the collection and sale of tracking 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.
You can read the AP and New York Times articles here:
Tim
Central Minnesota Political
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