They Know Where You've Been

Marshall Buxton
iphonecracked.jpg

Last week a report was released revealing that iphone and android smart phones track your location at all times and transmit it back to Apple and Google respectively. This discovery has many worried about who has access to this data, and how it could be abused.

Both companies are likely using this data to tap into the market of location-based services, but there is something to be said about privacy. As we enter an age where our personal information is more publicly available, isn't it important to start talking about who has access to our information and what they could do with it? Is this something inevitable in our technological future? Or do we have a say?

 

Image by Patrick Hosely on Flickr courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing.

 

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Comments

Nothing New

Submitted by Earl Rhodes on Sat, 04/30/2011 - 14:38.
The iPhone in particular creates a "secret" file on your phone that keeps track of your locations, and when you connect it to you computer, it somehow transfers the file there. If they are using this for location-based search results & services, then why do they need to store everything? Why is this log secret? Why did they decide to do this without making it explictly clear that the phone will transfer a file to your computer without you knowing? Some people will maintain that this is what you are opting in for when you sign up. But, this is clearly an unconscionable contract. That is, this is something that people would never agree to if directly given a choice. So rather than deal with the messy details, the phone just automates it for you, so you don't get upset. Additionally, Android is all about location monitoring. Those phones have a "speech-to-text" option, which curiously requires you to agree to have your location data transmitted to Google. I'm sure there's a fancy explanation for this. The software does use an internet application to translate the words for you, but why is it that you have to agree to this so-called "anonymous" data mining for something that clearly needs to connect on only one basis? Perhaps there is an appropriate explanation for this, but anyone reading this gets the point. Somewhat recently, Google did a software update on every single Android phone, at one time, and without informing anybody beforehand. They have access to every bit of data on every Android device. It's been known for years that tracking software can be covertly installed on even the most basic phones, so that whomever installs it can see where that phone is going, in real time. It's not something recent. It's just that now, people with expensive devices finally have a use for this type of tracking software, in the event that the phone is lost.  The general rule is that, if you sign up to use a cellphone, everything you do with that device is subject to other people being able to access everything you do on it. In 2006, the NSA showed off technology to WIRED magazine that demonstrated just how much access they are admitting to have. In this article, an agent was able to look at a giant list of accounts on a computer screen, including everything from Facebook (which was essentially started, or at least encouraged by the DOD), email, live phone conversations, text messages. The agent demonstrated how he could click from one item to the next, pulling up actual converstaions, opening all manners of online accounts, and this was shown to be a seemless, integrated process. Now here's the kicker. In this story, Apple announced that they are working on a fix for this little tracking issue. My guess is that they are trying to find out how to make it more covert. It's the same thing that every instutition that was ever caught up in abuse has stated, for thousands of years: "OK, well that was then and this is now. Things are different now." The Catholic church has done this quite a lot. When it came out about the level of spying going on in America during the Bush administration, the response was, "Oh... you know about that.. well, we are going to keep doing it, but we're not going to do people who don't warrant investigation." So this WIRED article touches upon a very alarming aspect: This is what they are admitting to.

Yep this is bad

Submitted by Scrubycritter on Sun, 05/01/2011 - 18:50.
The more information on us that the corporations/govt. has the less powerful we are. They can get all kinds on info on the people as a whole and as we all know, knowledge is power. This is a very important aspect for them, they NEED to know what we are doing, what we are buying, and what we are saying. That way the oppression of the people can continue. Even this comment that I am writing right now, I don't doubt, will be put into some electronic database. Nothing is sacred anymore, and we should not expect any type of privacy. This is what our society has become.  Worst of all, the govt and the corporations are so shady, they keep so many dirty little secrets from us, yet they know every single detail of our lives, and this is the biggest disadvantage.  There is no transparacy in our instituitions and yet we are see-through

TomTom Sold Data To Police

Submitted by Earl Rhodes on Tue, 05/10/2011 - 12:28.
I just came across a new article, wherein TomTom issued an apology for selling their traffic data to police in the Netherlands. It turns out that police used it to set up speed traps, and possilby speed cameras in the future. But they are sorry now. How could they have known this is how police would use historic speed data for these puproses, they argued?