It’s going to take serious amounts of data leaking before something is done to combat this.
A couple of politicians having their affairs outed would do it.
Evidently that doesn’t damage your public support anymore.
Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
131–140 of 181 posts
Re: Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
#132“We’re not doing anything not disclosed in our terms of service.” is rapidly becoming a no longer acceptable answer to consumers. Don’t tell me a weather app needs to know my location all the time to give me the best weather info then sell my location to the highest bidder. Don’t tell me that buried in some 20 pages of leagalese in your Ts&Cs is some vague references that make this “legal.”
I would respectfully disagree. It is not acceptable to roughly the amount of people (and I include myself) who make a deliberate and self conscious decision to oppose it. This is a small, small group. I have a phone with Replicant OS, which puts me within a niche group of an already niche group (those willing to install alternative OS and strip Google on their phone). In a wider computing sense - what percentage of H…
I think people are aware, they are just unable to understand the price they actually pay for such things. Answers like "well I have nothing to hide so I don't care if some FBI agent sees what I masturbate to" or "ads don't make me want to buy the product" show that the average person either doesn't fully understand the technology or completely misses the point. When you try to explain to someone how a goofy insurance commercial isn't supposed to "make them want to go and switch insurance" they just don't get it.
Re: Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
#133Folks here may be interested in knowing that our team has been working with many others on building out a Privacy-Enhanced Android, which seeks to offer new programming models, new isolation mechanisms, and new user interfaces to help improve the entire ecosystem of privacy. This is a DARPA-funded project.
Some of our team's work (past and present) that may be of interest to folks here: - We analyzed the privacy of Android apps at http://privacygrade.org" rel="nofollow">http://privacygrade.org">http://privacygrade.org. The basic idea is that we use crowdsourcing to generate a model of what people are concerned about, and then apply that to all the apps we crawled. We're working on an update of PrivacyGrade using network data too, to map out who knows what about us and why.
- Perhaps one of the biggest findings from our team's research is that over 40% of apps that use sensitive data only do so because of third-party libraries (e.g. advertisers or analytics). We've mentioned this in talks to the FTC, Google, Apple, and others, that these third party libraries are the biggest point of leverage here if we want to solve the problem. See this paper: Does" rel="nofollow">http://www.cmuchimps.org/publications/does_this_app_really_n... this App Really Need My Location? Context-Aware Privacy Management for Smartphones (PDF).
- https://privacyproxy.io/" rel="nofollow">https://privacyproxy.io/">https://privacyproxy.io/ (sorry, self-signed certificate is a bit out of date). This is a VPN that scans outgoing traffic for likely personally-identifiable information
- http://www.android.protectmyprivacy.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.android.protectmyprivacy.org/">http://www.android.... This requires rooted phones, intercepts calls to sensitive data on your phone, and aims to help you make better decisions by surfacing these calls and showing you how what the majority chose to share
- https://privacystreams.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://privacystreams.github.io/">https://privacystreams.gi.... This is a new programming model that aims to make developers' lives easier, and improve privacy as a side effect by making accesses to sensitive data easier to analyze. A key observation is that most apps don't need fine-grained data, but currently apps require all-or-nothing access. For example, raw audio vs "just loudness", or exact GPS vs "what city". We offer stream-like processing that makes it easier for devs to get the granularity they want, which also makes the app much easier to analyze. So we can analyze an app and output "this app uses your microphone to get loudness"
- Fostering" rel="nofollow">https://www.slideshare.net/jas0nh0ng/fostering-an-ecosystem-... an Ecosystem of Smartphone Privacy, this is a talk I gave last month that summarizes a lot of our team's work on privacy
Our DARPA PM has asked us to focus a lot more on tech transfer activities for our final year, so if any of you are interested, send me a mail. (This is tech transfer in terms of getting industry to adopt our ideas, not necessarily commercialization or licensing.)
Re: Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
#134iOS now forcing "While Using" option on all apps is the greatest thing ever. Before this, some apps where forcing the "Always" option on users. Uber and Waze come to mind. iOS also gives you a warning from time to time about apps using your location in the background. I think iOS right now has the best location management. --- People are surprised when seeing the Activity section in Google's account details, then fre…
If carriers let outsiders buy cell tower data there is literally nothing you can do except switch on airplane mode.
Re: Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
#135I scanned the article, but this mostly sounds like they are painting this as an application behavior. It isn't true. There are tons of companies that use RAW location data that you cannot opt out of. https://airsage.com/
AirSage is very clearly offering non-anonymized (read: private) information about individuals. That is, they offer "insights like the home and work locations of people".
> AirSage uses its massive source data and patented algorithms to understand the movement of population and trips start to finish, origin to destination every day for the entire country. It’s not just about the where and when. Through years of research and development, AirSage also knows the “why”, or purpose, of the more than a billion trips made in the United States every day.
> Understanding populations as they relate to the physical world has been the core competency of AirSage since the beginning. For any physical point of interest in the United States, insights like the home and work locations of people seen in an area or duration of stay or frequency of visits are all characteristics that can provide a new level of understanding never before capable.
> Brands and Marketers recognize that the world is not just about what takes place on the screen of a tv, computer or mobile phone. It’s about how technology helps enhance our real physical world. AirSage is a leader in providing insightful information about the audiences advertisers want to reach as they relate to the locations and places that people spend their time.
Re: Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
#136iOS now forcing "While Using" option on all apps is the greatest thing ever. Before this, some apps where forcing the "Always" option on users. Uber and Waze come to mind. iOS also gives you a warning from time to time about apps using your location in the background. I think iOS right now has the best location management. --- People are surprised when seeing the Activity section in Google's account details, then fre…
I at least get a substantial value add to my life having Google track me everywhere. It might be overly sentimental but being able to see everywhere I've been in the last ~seven years on Maps feels to me like one of the great innovations Google has made. If people accept Google will sell that data to subsidize the cost of persisting it you get a permanent record of everywhere you've gone. I think its cool to have. It…
Stating it as a direct trade for the service being no charge is fallacious in that Google does not actually give you the option to just pay money for the service/storage and skip the surveillance. Instead, the true price remains nebulous - with your "permanent record" continuing to grow and becoming ever more of a liability.
It's certainly possible to develop user-centric software with the same functionality and polish, at a grassroots level. The fact that the industry is being dominated by VC money looking for scalable winner-takes-all growth is indicative of the magnitude of what's really at stake.
Re: Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
#137Any tips for avoiding location sharing on Android?
Disable WiFi scanning and Bluetooth scanning. Search for "scan" in settings.
Re: Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
#138iOS now forcing "While Using" option on all apps is the greatest thing ever. Before this, some apps where forcing the "Always" option on users. Uber and Waze come to mind. iOS also gives you a warning from time to time about apps using your location in the background. I think iOS right now has the best location management. --- People are surprised when seeing the Activity section in Google's account details, then fre…
I respectfully disagree on Google being entirely transparent about tracking location, especially if you run Android + Google Play Services. I have a tablet (Pixel C) that runs LineageOS + Google Play Services and a Phone (Nexus 5x) that runs LineageOS vanilla (no MicroG, no UnifiedNLP, no Google Play Services). Some things I have noted: - When you install MicroG/Google Play Services, they take over location services…
Not to mention they buried their option to turn off location tracking on Google Maps within some legal submenu in the app, instead of in the privacy settings menu. If that qualifies as "transparent" I don't know what the word means anymore.
Re: Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
#139The production value of these lavish spreads by the New York Times is impressive.
IIRC Mike Bostock used to work for them and while there was responsible for D3js and more. They've taken the smart path in publishing and took the transition to digital seriously.
Re: Companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds
#140iOS now forcing "While Using" option on all apps is the greatest thing ever. Before this, some apps where forcing the "Always" option on users. Uber and Waze come to mind. iOS also gives you a warning from time to time about apps using your location in the background. I think iOS right now has the best location management. --- People are surprised when seeing the Activity section in Google's account details, then fre…
Strange, for me Google maps doesn't remember anything I searched for. It tells me to turn on location history. And I'm an EU citizen.
Google can fuck right off with their location tracking. When I got my phone, it defaulted to asking me invasive questions about places I was visiting. The option to turn off those nag screens was hidden so deeply I felt compelled to neuter the entire shebang. Disgusting dark patterns.
Screenshot taken just now: https://imgur.com/a/ewSCeRn
My next phone will be an Apple device due to this insidious crap.