Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
blog.valverde.me
Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
#2FWIW, in the IOS version of the app, the offending check box appears to be disabled by default.
(I certainly didn't disable it, so I can only assume that's the state from install).
Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
#3FWIW, in the IOS version of the app, the offending check box appears to be disabled by default. (I certainly didn't disable it, so I can only assume that's the state from install).
Interesting. I created a test account just to be sure I hadn't accidentally opted in before and, sure enough, it was enabled.
Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
#4The 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.
Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
#5It 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 services recently to fix things up. The biggest offenders were Foursquare and the Google app. I ended up turning Google off completely, and disabled Foursquare except for when I have the app open. Problem solved.
Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
#6BTW here is a nice project I came across that should do the same thing as Fiddler, but it's for Linux rather than Windows:
To decrypt HTTPS you follow the same procedure of installing a root certificate on your phone.
Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
#7The 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).
Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
#8I'm pretty sure there are a lot of apps that have similar behavior. I know at one time Twitter and Facebook did something similar.
Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
#9I'm pretty sure there are a lot of apps that have similar behavior. I know at one time Twitter and Facebook did something similar.
Does Facebook still do that? Do you remember where you read that it did at one time?
Re: Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations
#10I'm pretty sure there are a lot of apps that have similar behavior. I know at one time Twitter and Facebook did something similar.
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.