New York Times:
The millions of dots on the map trace highways, side streets and bike trails — each one following the path of an anonymous cellphone user.
One path tracks someone from a home outside Newark to a nearby Planned Parenthood, remaining there for more than an hour. Another represents a person who travels with the mayor of New York during the day and returns to Long Island at night.
Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7 a.m. and travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher. Her smartphone goes with her.
An app on the device gathered her location information, which was then sold without her knowledge. It recorded her whereabouts as often as every two seconds, according to a database of more than a million phones in the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Ms. Magrin’s identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily connect her to that dot.
And:
At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found.
And:
More than 1,000 popular apps contain location-sharing code from such companies, according to 2018 data from MightySignal, a mobile analysis firm. Google’s Android system was found to have about 1,200 apps with such code, compared with about 200 on Apple’s iOS.
This is a riveting read. And there’s an amazing embedded graphic that takes you on a virtual map travel, following Ms. Magrin’s travels. (Note that the NYTimes didn’t dox her, she allowed the Times access to her data.)
From this Reddit post:
Instead of allowing apps all-or-nothing access to your GPS location, Apple should allow for a granular spectrum of access that the user chooses. This could go deeper and also be on a time- and location-based factor too. So instead of just “Allow or Don’t Allow Access to Location,” after which you’d have to go into the settings to change, there should be the ability to choose between exact GPS location, zip code (or the country’s relevant postal code), county, state, and time zone.
Apple already beefed up its privacy protections by adding “Only while using the app” as an Location Services icon in an iOS update, but it’s time to go further. In addition to the different degrees of location specificity, there should also be an “Allow once” option for situations where the user wants to allow it now but not necessary have that become the Location Services setting for the app that then requires opening up Settings and digging into the app’s preferences to change it.
And from this Motherboard article from Jason Koebler:
It’s not just Facebook: Android and iOS’s App Stores have incentivized an app economy where free apps make money by selling your personal data and location history to advertisers.
And:
The apps on your smartphone are tracking you, and that for all the talk about “anonymization” and claims that the data is collected only in aggregate, our habits are so specific—and often unique—so that anonymized identifiers can often be reverse engineered and used to track individual people.
Some have made the suggestion that users should just turn off Location Services (Settings > Privacy > Location Services). But this is an overreach. Location Services has real value. It lets you find misplaced devices, find people who share their locations with you, lets useful services know when you are nearby.
It’s the misuse of this data, the exporting it as a source of revenue that, in my opinion, is the setting Apple should expose. To me, this is the missing setting:
Settings > Privacy > Location > Allow my data to be exported
And who would ever check that checkbox? Certainly not me.
The ideas here all sound good based on usage patterns. I would be most enthused to see a setting for a pop-up through which you could give one-time access. This already exists in Safari, and it’s just right: the wording is clear, it’s clear why I’m being asked, and it’s clear what to do. This would also have the side benefit (should one choose to want to keep track of these things) of knowing what apps are requesting your location data all the time. Even with such protection, I’d use that information to get rid of apps that aren’t necessary that keep asking.
Though I heard a podcast episode recently, connected to this NY Times article, that pointed out that though Apple has made a lot of marketing noise about privacy and putting in more features to keep users aware of apps that are using location services, they also have a business reason for not doing so (keeping the developers happy).
Data do not need to be exported by the os. If the app can read it. It can save/upload it himself.
ARS posted something about this a couple of months ago.
Search for “Dozens of iOS apps surreptitiously share user location data with tracking firms”
“Sudo Security’s Guardian mobile firewall” may be worth a look too if you are so inclined.
That would be like turning Location Services off. It makes any app that uses location data useless. In a town or an area of town that you don’t know well and want a lunch spot? “Hey Siri, show me Mexican restaurants near me”… which is only one example of how accurate location benefits the user. Mapping is obviously another one.
The Allow Once thing could work but could also become annoying depending on app use. I like the “allow to be exported” idea with the default set to off so you have to explicitly opt in.
But let’s not lose sight of this – app developers aren’t just doing this to be mean. People don’t want to pay for apps and when they do, they want to pay very little and yet get lifetime updates. Given that, an app developer is incentivized to find and use other sources of revenue. Especially if they feel the location data is anonymized, they may well not see harm in selling that data.
PS:
This reddit post excerpt is why we don’t let techies design products:
“So instead of just “Allow or Don’t Allow Access to Location,” after which you’d have to go into the settings to change, there should be the ability to choose between exact GPS location, zip code (or the country’s relevant postal code), county, state, and time zone.“
no normal person will do that and everything aside from precise GPS renders most location aware functions useless. That’s why there’s the on/off choice.
sure… but most people won’t do that, so it’s a non-starter. Anyway, you have that now. Turn off Location Services. Turn it on when you want to use it. Same exact action. Do many people do this? No. So what would they toggle a Falsify option?