Your Smartphone Is Helping Companies Spy on You
All those silly jokes you've made over the years about your smartphone's apparent ability to spy on you, it turns out, have been true. And as The New York Times details in a new investigative piece, the reality of the situation is even worse than previously imagined. Advertisers aren't just aware of the things you like to buy—they can figure out where you are, pretty much whenever they want.
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. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States—about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times—a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company—reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day.
The primary function of said tracking data is, unsurprisingly, to make a ton of money for those with access to it. The Times says location-targeted advertising was a $21 billion dollar industry this year, but it's the fine print involved that is truly the stuff of next-level dystopian nightmares.
...the explanations people see when prompted to give permission are often incomplete or misleading. An app may tell users that granting access to their location will help them get traffic information, but not mention that the data will be shared and sold. That disclosure is often buried in a vague privacy policy.
Advertisers and app-makers contend that the data they accumulate is anonymous. They argue that they don't know who's going to the doctor's office, then Rite-Aid, then a specific home address, just that someone is doing it. That in itself is an absurd line of reasoning—as The Times points out, it's remarkably easy to figure out someone's name and personal information after observing their movements. And although most people's immediate concerns are the mildly-embarrassing comings and goings that their phones might reveal, the potential for wrongdoing is vast. If any of the companies that purchase this data are hacked—which seems to happen with alarming and increasing frequency these days—the claims of harmlessness no longer have any merit. Or, if the government wanted to use this information to quietly keep track of certain individuals in the United States, it isn't clear what, exactly, would stop them from doing so.
Then there's the issue of public figures and politicians: The Times includes a tidbit that "two location firms, Fysical and SafeGraph, mapped people attending the 2017 presidential inauguration. On Fysical’s map, a bright red box near the Capitol steps indicated the general location of President Trump and those around him, cellphones pinging away." Given that agents of hostile foreign powers have already been eavesdropping on the president's phone calls, it stands to reason that similarly-nefarious hackers could track his every move outside the White House, too.
This is one of those problems without a simple solution, because harvesting users' personal information is what the corporations that are spying on consumers have decided is the price of the convenience of using their apps. (As MSNBC's Ari Melber has said repeatedly, for a company like Facebook, you are the product.) You're welcome to disagree with their assessment—in light of the Times report, it's hard to imagine anyone who wouldn't disagree with that assessment—but what's the alternative? Millions of people aren't going to return to flip phones, or leave their smartphones at home, or parse all 277 paragraphs of each "User Agreement" before tapping "Install." And if users somehow decided en masse that enough is enough, and that they'd pay to excise data-selling from the smartphone ecosystem, they'd still have to be "worth" a combined $21 billion to outweigh the intere$t$ of advertisers.
The story is terrible PR for advertisers, as well as makers of apps and smartphones; meetings were surely had about how to "minimize" the "damage" from the article. But there are no long-term repercussions for them to worry about, because they know people have become more dependent on products than they are outraged about the treatment of personal information. The smartest way for companies to avoid facing consequences for their actions is to ensure that consumers have no way out. The Share My Location feature is completely redundant—download a couple of apps, and they'll make sure to do that for you.
