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Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

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Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#51

Post by freepor »

alexfromapex wrote: post #44
indymike wrote: post #17

Many of the apps that sell your location use location as a critical component of the experience. Apple and Google added a permission last year - only allow access to location when app is running (in the foreground). That change has made a dramatic reduction in the amount of location data available. Ultimately, free is the culprit. People like to navigate, buy stuff online, see things on a map, get local weather, and…

Letting an app use your location and allowing it to sell that data should be mutually exclusive opt-ins in my opinion instead of just one setting

The problem is that Apple has no way of truly controlling what someone does with data once they have it.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#54

Post by matheusmoreira »

indymike wrote: post #17

Many of the apps that sell your location use location as a critical component of the experience. Apple and Google added a permission last year - only allow access to location when app is running (in the foreground). That change has made a dramatic reduction in the amount of location data available. Ultimately, free is the culprit. People like to navigate, buy stuff online, see things on a map, get local weather, and…

Being a user of free applications and services does not automatically give corporations the right to exploit people by collecting and selling their personal information without consent.

Ironically, the data of paying customers is even more valuable. Spending money on these things is probably a great way to make them pay even more attention to you. For example, mobile game companies seem to know everything about their big spenders and I've read that some are in direct contact with those players.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#55

Post by cosmojg »

Can I legally purchase the anonymized location data of a few thousand Americans, run that through a script which associates coordinates with addresses, and publish the deanonymized results as an art piece like this?

If so, this could be a lot of fun. It would be interesting to see the political backlash, especially if the published dataset includes politicians. Perhaps, in the name of ethics, it should include only politicians, and only those who have voted against privacy legislation. Maybe we'd finally end up with something like the GDPR here in the States.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#56

Post by rmrfstar »

pravda wrote: post #19

A question for the Android experts: is it possible to block or spoof location data, through a custom build? Could I have an Android phone running a program that spoofs a long steady drive from Tampa to Butte?

Yes, but that does not stop the cell providers from selling your location [1].

You could also run an Android VM in the cloud and RDP to it when you want to use sketchy (edit: free) apps. This approach could have saved Bezos some trouble [2].

[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hu...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/22/technology/jeff-bezos-hac...

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#57

Post by judge2020 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #54
indymike wrote: post #17

Many of the apps that sell your location use location as a critical component of the experience. Apple and Google added a permission last year - only allow access to location when app is running (in the foreground). That change has made a dramatic reduction in the amount of location data available. Ultimately, free is the culprit. People like to navigate, buy stuff online, see things on a map, get local weather, and…

Being a user of free applications and services does not automatically give corporations the right to exploit people by collecting and selling their personal information without consent. Ironically, the data of paying customers is even more valuable. Spending money on these things is probably a great way to make them pay even more attention to you. For example, mobile game companies seem to know everything about their…

> without consent.

that's the point, they "gave consent" via the terms and conditions checkbox, and this is upheld in court since the user knew they were getting the service for free. Few countries have kept up with their laws to protect consumers from this.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#58

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

whoopdedo wrote: post #12
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #6

What I don’t get about this kind of thing is that it’s not just shady data resellers you’ve never heard of. It’s also overt, high profile, branded tech companies like Foursquare and Yelp, with huge amassed data sets of foot traffic, wifi scans, battery status, often paired with demographic info or data that can be joined by ad IDs or commercial device graphs. If these companies are able to keep on truckin’ with massi…

When someone uses an app such as Yelp it's like valet parking. They know they're handing over something vital, but its with the expectation that the company will provide something of value in exchange, and trusting that they won't use it for more than that. Yes, you're allowing a company to track your movement (for the purpose of grading restaurants). And yes, you're allowing someone else to drive your car (for the p…

“I hand over my data in exchange for the app handing over a valuable experience or service” is the hugest lie in the business. This is exactly what the disingenuous marketing doublespeak of Yelp and Foursquare says.

In reality, most users really do not understand or consent to the level of data tracking and are very confused about terms of use or privacy settings in the app or just on their device.

The big problem is that it is just not possible for the vast majority of people to have enough expertise or technical know-how to give anything resembling informed consent. Whatever the user is agreeing to, it emphatically is not anything like consent.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#59

Post by martimarkov »

meritt wrote: post #38
saagarjha wrote: post #25

This is one of the reasons why I'm generally not OK with "anonymized" data collection without an explanation of how it's being anonymized. It's almost always easy, often trivially easy, to correlate the data together and basically get a perfect recreation of whatever the original data was back.

Anonymization in the data reselling industry is often some form of md5(lower($email)). It's a joke. They even do that for extremely small search spaces like phone numbers. It's still provided at the individual user-level and even if the anonymization is done in a way that's irreversible, you only need to know a single event for a given person and you now have their entire history. For example, there's a popular email…

Wait... WHAT?!?! I mean if I think about it, yeah that makes sense to have been built but WTF?!?

Care to share which email client it is? It should be killed with fire!!!

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