How—And Why—Apple, Google, And Facebook Follow You Around In Real Life
Many apps wouldn’t work without location data. But few realize just how often that location tracking is happening—even when it’s not necessary, even when their apps aren’t being used, and, increasingly, even when a user isn’t even carrying their phone. Tracking you across the map isn’t always about improving user experience, of course, but rather about better understanding who you are and what kind of advertising to show you.
It’s hard to dispute the value of a good sale, but location tracking raises all sorts of privacy concerns.
Should app makers know where we live, where our children go to school, where we go to get away from it all? And if so, how much should they tell us about it?
Those complicated questions help explain why the biggest tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Verizon, filed a pro-privacy amicus brief in last month’s Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States, in which they argued that police should have a warrant before accessing cell phone location data. After all, if we thought the police could easily access our data, we might start asking more questions about what our phones know about us, and become less comfortable with using these companies’ products.
But location tracking is quietly, sometimes surreptitiously, baked into the web’s modern data collection regime. According to a recent study by French research organization Exodus Privacy and Yale University’s Privacy Lab, more than three in four Android apps contain at least one third-party “tracker,” which uses various techniques to glean personal information, including location and in-app behavior, to better target users for advertisements and services.
Even so-called anonymized location data—without our real-life name attached to it—can help paint a detailed portrait of a user and their habits, or even crack open their entire identity.
Here’s how three of the largest companies are gathering your location, and what, if anything, you can do about it.
APPLE: “A BETTER USER EXPERIENCE” AND TARGETED ADS
Like Facebook and Google, it only makes your data available to them by putting you in an “anonymized” targeting group.
All of this location data is owned by Apple. At the very bottom of another page, Apple clarifies that by enabling Location Services for your devices, “you agree and consent to the transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of your location data and location search queries by Apple, its partners, and licensees to provide and improve location-based and road traffic-based products and services.”
GOOGLE: AN ARSENAL OF TOOLS TRACKS YOU ONLINE AND OFFLINE
Like Facebook and others, Google is working to insert itself even further into our daily transactions, and location data is critical to that. Google’s fleet of apps—Gmail, Chrome, Gchat, and of course Maps—collect location data with user permission; other apps in the Android ecosystem also gather location data, sometimes without permission (see above). Like many other data companies, Google also follows users across the internet with web cookies that track IP addresses, which, as the Guardian reported last year, allows the service to make pretty informed guesses on user locations and habits.
The tech giant also uses what is known as “implicit location information,” which is when Google interprets a search for a specific location...
In May, Google announced a new program aimed at tracking users’ offline locations and behavior too, using data gathered from third-parties. (The company says it has access to about 70% of U.S. credit and debit card transactions through partnerships with data companies.)
Google collected the physical addresses of nearby cell towers with which Android users’ phones were communicating for everyday text, call and app usage.
FACEBOOK CAN ALSO TELL WHERE YOU SHOP OFFLINE
As with other smartphone apps, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram also attempt to capture your location across devices and throughout the course of the day, from your early-morning reading habits, to a Spotify playlist during your commute, to your social media browsing at night.
HOW WHATSAPP AND INSTAGRAM FEED FACEBOOK’S LOCATION DATABASE
Some apps are less obvious about their location tracking. Take WhatsApp, the popular Facebook-owned messaging app that lets users communicate with encryption via Wi-Fi instead of on their cellular data plans.
In November 2016, after protests and pressure from privacy regulators in Europe over Facebook’s decision to combine WhatsApp data with Facebook data, the social media platform temporarily paused its data sharing program for European users. In May, the European Commission fined Facebook $122 million for misleading WhatsApp users about its data sharing with Facebook.
On Tuesday, a probe into Facebook by the German competition authority—the first anti-trust investigation the company has faced in Europe—said in a preliminary report that the social network was using its dominance to illegally track users across the internet and reinforce its might in online advertising.
Keep in mind: as the research into third-party apps has shown, just because an app says it isn’t recording our location doesn’t always mean that it isn’t.
See the full story here: https://www.fastcompany.com/40477441/facebook-google-apple-know-where-you-are