The New York Times published a horrifying
investigation which reviewed a huge, "anonymized" dataset of
smartphone location data from a third-party vendor, de-anonymized it, and
tracked ordinary people through their day-to-day lives, including sensitive
stops at places like their homes or their offices.
Dozens of companies use smartphone locations
to help advertisers and even hedge funds. They say it is anonymous, but the
data shows how personal it is in real life. 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.
These companies sell, use or analyze the
data to cater to advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds seeking
insights into consumer behavior. It is a hot market, with sales of
location-targeted advertising reaching an estimated 21 billion dollars this
year.
More than 1,000 popular apps contain location-sharing code from such companies, according to 2018 data from 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.
The app developers can make money by
directly selling your data, or by sharing it for location-based ads, which
command a premium. Location data companies pay half a cent to two cents per
user per month, according to offer letters to app makers reviewed by The Times.
Targeted advertising is by far the most common use of the information.
Google and Facebook, which dominate the
mobile ad market, also lead in location-based advertising. Both companies
collect the data from their own apps. They say they do not sell it but keep it
for themselves to personalize their services, sell targeted ads across the
internet and track whether the ads lead to sales at brick-and-mortar stores.
Google, which also receives precise location
information from apps that use its ad services, said it modified that data to
make it less exact.
Apple and Google have a financial interest
in keeping developers happy, but both have taken steps to limit location data
collection. In the most recent version of Android, apps that are not in use can
collect locations "a few times an hour," instead of continuously.
Source:
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html
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