Your apps know where you were last night, and they’re not keeping it secret
Your apps know where you were last night, and they’re not
keeping it secret
The database reviewed by The New York 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.
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 New York Times found.
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, New Jersey, to a
nearby Planned Parenthood. Another represents a person who travels with New
York’s mayor during the day and returns to Long Island at night.
Yet another leaves a house in upstate New York at 7am and
travels to a middle school 14 miles away, staying until late afternoon each
school day. Only one person makes that trip: Lisa Magrin, 46, a 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 1 million phones in
the New York area that was reviewed by The New York Times. While Magrin’s
identity was not disclosed in those records, The Times was able to easily
connect her to that dot.
The app tracked her as she went to a Weight Watchers
meeting and to her dermatologist’s office. It followed her hiking and staying
at her ex-boyfriend’s home, information she found disturbing. “It’s the thought
of people finding out those intimate details that you don’t want people to
know,” said Magrin, who allowed The Times to review her location data.
Like many consumers, Magrin knew apps could track
people’s movements. But as smartphones have become ubiquitous and technology
more accurate, an industry of snooping on people’s daily habits has spread and
grown more intrusive.
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. 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.
These companies sell, use or analyze the data to cater to
advertisers, retail outlets and even hedge funds. It is a hot market, with
sales of location-targeted advertising reaching an estimated $21 billion this
year. IBM has gotten into the industry, with its purchase of the Weather
Channel’s apps.
Businesses say their interest is in the patterns, not the
identities, that the data reveals about consumers. They note that the
information apps collect is tied not to someone’s name or phone number but to a
unique ID. But those with access to the raw data — including employees or
clients — could still identify a person without consent. They could follow
someone they knew, by pinpointing a phone that regularly spent time at that
person’s home address. Or, working in reverse, they could attach a name to an
anonymous dot, by seeing where the device spent nights and using public records
to figure out who lived there.
Many location companies say that when phone users enable
location services, their data is fair game. But, The Times found, 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.
After Elise Lee, a nurse in Manhattan, saw that her
device had been tracked to the main operating room at the hospital where she
works, she expressed concern about her privacy and that of her patients. “It’s
very scary,” said Lee, who allowed The Times to examine her location history in
the data set it reviewed.
Retailers look to tracking companies to tell them about
their own customers and their competitors’. For a web seminar last year, Elina
Greenstein, an executive at the location company GroundTruth, mapped out the
path of a hypothetical consumer from home to work to show potential clients how
tracking could reveal a person’s preferences.
“We look to understand who a person is, based on where
they’ve been and where they’re going, in order to influence what they’re going
to do next,” Greenstein said. Health care facilities are among the more
enticing but troubling areas for tracking, as Lee’s reaction demonstrated. Tell
All Digital, a Long Island advertising firm that is a client of a location
company, says it runs ad campaigns for personal injury lawyers targeting people
anonymously in emergency rooms.
To evaluate location-sharing practices, The Times tested
20 apps, most of which had been flagged by researchers and industry insiders as
potentially sharing the data. Together, 17 of the apps sent exact latitude and
longitude to about 70 businesses. Precise location data from one app,
WeatherBug on iOS, was received by 40 companies. When contacted by The Times,
some of the companies that received that data described it as “unsolicited” or
“inappropriate.”
A Question of Awareness
Companies that use location data say people agree to
share their information in exchange for customized services, rewards and
discounts. Magrin, the teacher, noted that she liked that tracking technology
let her record her jogging routes. Brian Wong, chief executive of Kiip, a
mobile ad firm that has also sold anonymous data from some of the apps it works
with, says users give apps permission to use and share their data. “You are
receiving these services for free because advertisers are helping monetize and
pay for it,” he said, adding, “You would have to be pretty oblivious if you are
not aware that this is going on.”
But Lee, the nurse, had a different view. “I guess that’s
what they have to tell themselves,” she said of the companies. “But come on.”
Lee had given apps on her iPhone access to her location only for certain
purposes and only if they did not indicate that the information would be used
for anything else, she said. Magrin had allowed about a dozen apps on her
Android phone access to her whereabouts for services like traffic
notifications.
But it is easy to share information without realizing it.
Of the 17 apps The Times saw sending precise location data, just three on iOS
and one on Android told users in a prompt during the permission process that
the information could be used for advertising.
Following the Money
Apps form the backbone of this new location data economy.
The app developers can make money by directly selling their data, or by sharing
it for location-based ads, which command a premium. Location data companies pay
half a cent to 2 cents per user per month, according to offer letters to app
makers reviewed by The Times.
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.
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. Apple has been
stricter, for example requiring apps to justify collecting location details in
pop-up messages. But Apple’s instructions for writing these pop-ups do not
mention advertising or data sale.
Advertising
Apple recently shelved plans that industry insiders say
would have significantly curtailed location collection. Last year, the company
said an upcoming version of iOS would show a blue bar on screen whenever an app
not in use was gaining access to location data. The discussion served as a
“warning shot” to people in the location industry, David Shim, chief executive
of the location company Placed, said at an industry event last year.
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