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Smartphone Users Tracked by Apps an Average of every Three Minutes
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Using a smartphone can mean revealing your whereabouts nearly all the time, according to new research performed by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University.
Working with nearly two dozen smartphone owners using the Android operating system over a two-week period, researchers found some apps collected GPS data from those phones an average of every three minutes.
The average was calculated after the computer scientists found that about a dozen or so Android apps gathered GPS data 6,200 times per study participant during the two weeks.
Some of the apps mentioned in the study include The Weather Channel, which collected GPS data every 10 minutes. Another app, Groupon, requested a smartphone owner’s coordinates 1,062 times in two weeks.
“Does Groupon really need to know where you are every 20 minutes?” asked Norman M. Sadeh, a Carnegie Mellon professor who co-authored the study. “The person would have to be accessing Groupon in their sleep.”
During one part of the study, the smartphone participants were sent daily messages informing them of the number of times their personal information—such as current location, incoming and outgoing phone calls, and their contacts lists—had been shared with app companies. For instance, one such message read: “Your location has been shared 5,398 times with Facebook, Groupon, GO Launcher EX and seven other apps in the last 14 days.”
The study participants were usually taken off guard and not too pleased at the revelations. One person reacted to the findings by saying: “4,182 (times) – are you kidding me? It felt like I’m being followed by my own phone. It was scary. That number is too high.”
Source: http://truthisscary.com/2015/04/smartphone-users-tracked-by-apps-an-average-of-every-three-minutes/
if you think thats bad the just living next to someone with a wifi connection allows Goolge to upload your wifi’s MAC address along with about ten others in your area to make Geo-Locations work.
Google tried to hide what it is doing as usual by using SSL encrypted traffic but a simple hack to see what is going on in Firefox is to type about:config into the URL and then search for one of the many “Google” values in prefs.js
Now edit the Geo.Fifi.Url value and change it to a http address from a https address and then use a proxy server to view the requests coming from Firefox to see whats going on.
Google admits it is doing this and says that people can opt out by adding a prefix to the name of the wifi access point but Google has opted in to recive fake Geo-Locations requests from me by processing any MAC address that does not end in “AA” if thats how the game is to be played.
This is hacking by any standard and Google needs to be stopped.
Microsoft also does something down these lines but i don’t know the technical details