Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations

blog.valverde.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 47 posts

Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations

#11

Post by soneca »

valverde wrote: post #10
soneca wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Facebook still do that? Do you remember where you read that it did at one time?

I had Facebook installed while investigating for this article, and could not identify a similar behavior. Google, on the other hand, did the exact same thing, but I remember explicitly agreeing to that.

valverde, my startup www.frequento.com.br/parceiros works on a related topic, would love to talk to you about it.

I just added you on LinkedIn (Rodrigo Pontes), or email me.

Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations

#13

Post by salemh »

fintler wrote: post #5

It was enabled for me by default, but the iOS location icon is always displayed on the Springboard when it's being used. Also, Foursquare will constantly send you notifications saying "It looks like you're near Foobar, would you like to check in?". They make it very, very obvious that they're tracking your location. It was a quick matter of going into preferences and looking to see what applications used location ser…

I could see the notifications of locations helpful if it was "trained" (Netflix learning algo style) after a time, but the time to "train" the learning/notifications wouldn't be worth the annoyance of the high-frequency of popups.

I wonder if they have tried frequency intervals/usage/checkins.

Even Netflix (anecdote) took perhaps a year or more until recommendations "fit" my profile.

Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations

#14

Post by Breefield »

valverde wrote: post #7
joshbaptiste wrote: post #4

The second portion of the post which explains how to capture traffic leaving your device is more informative and probably should have been the main thesis rather than focusing on Foursquare's non-surprising use of constant geo location updates.

Thank you for the feedback. That was my original intention, but seeing the constant location updates from Foursquare while writing the article surprised me (admittedly not too much).

While recently digging into CoreLocation's CLLocationManager recently I also discovered that any app which is given location privileges can be saving your location every 10 min in the background. It was a surprise to me too.

Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations

#16

Post by valverde »

chubot wrote: post #6

BTW here is a nice project I came across that should do the same thing as Fiddler, but it's for Linux rather than Windows: http://mitmproxy.org/ To decrypt HTTPS you follow the same procedure of installing a root certificate on your phone.

Thanks! I added that to the article.

Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations

#19

Post by valverde »

msoad wrote: post #18

Because of this I assume companies will start encrypting their JSON to make it impossible to see what is going through their application. A lot of lawsuits can start from this kind of exploring.

Making it impossible is impossible. They might make it more difficult.
Post reply on HN