Hundreds of companies and organizations use smartphone locations for a multitude of reasons. One thing is for sure, the information is certainly not anonymous. More than 1,000 popular apps contain location-sharing code.
An app on your device gathers and records your location information as often as every two seconds. While your identity is not disclosed in those records, The New York Times showed how easy it was to easily connect a person to each of those 2 second dots. This information can then be sold without your knowledge. For example, an app tracked person X as she went to a Weight Watchers meeting and to her dermatologist’s office for a minor procedure. It followed her hiking with her dog and staying at her ex-boyfriend’s home. In four months her location was recorded over 8,600 times.
Many consumers know that apps can track people’s movements. But as smartphones have become ubiquitous and technology more accurate, an industry of snooping on people’s daily habits has spread and grown more intrusive.
Many companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information. 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 Times reviewed a sample of information gathered by one company, revealing 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. Sales of location-targeted advertising reached 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. Location information is invasive. It 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.
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 can still identify a person without consent. They could attach a name to an anonymous dot, by seeing where the device spent nights and using public records to determine who lived there.
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.
The mobile location industry began as a way to customize apps and target ads for nearby businesses, but it has morphed into a data collection and analysis machine. Retailers look to tracking companies to tell them about their own customers and their competitors’.They look to understand who a person is, based on where they’ve been and where they’re going, in order to influence what they’re going to do next. Financial firms can use the information to make investment decisions before a company reports earnings — seeing, for example, if more people are working on a factory floor, or going to a retailer’s stores. One client of a location company runs ad campaigns for personal injury lawyers targeting people anonymously in emergency rooms. Location firms mapped people attending the 2017 presidential inauguration even indicating the location of President Trump and those around him through cellphones.
There is no federal law limiting the collection or use of such data. Still, apps that ask for access to users’ locations, prompting them for permission while leaving out important details about how the data will be used, may run afoul of federal rules on deceptive business practices.
Now that you know that, does anyone feel better?
My Dads GPS in his car kept directing him to cliff edges. I think that’s what led him to his downfall