In the article it mentions that the data comes from apps on the phone, so insofar as the user has clicked through the EULA, Privacy Policy, and permissions scre

In the article it mentions that the data comes from apps on the phone, so insofar as the user has clicked through the EULA, Privacy Policy, and permissions screens[0], it's voluntary in theory but obviously not in practice. The interesting thing is that the data source comes from "hundreds" of innocuous apps (weather, directions to ATMs, social media add-ons) that send the user's location data to a company that aggregates and then sells it. This in turn is only possible because for useful but easily coded apps, you'll always have a race to the bottom on price, and once you hit free then the only way to make a return on your investment is by taking advantage of the user, by ads or by tracking. And it will be this way for the forseeable future, or at least until the harvested data indicates that there's uncaptured profit in making apps that aren't free, but promise to respect your privacy. ----- 0. It sure would be nice if someone could use natural language processing to parse the legalese and spit out a summary of what you're really agreeing to. Maybe combined with some sort of phone-farm (like they use for testing builds on different devices) to download various apps in order to acquire the corpus and maybe test the what servers the apps communicate with, and how often. I know that there are sites dedicated to interpreting EULAs from major companies/apps, but probably the greater threat is the myriad free utility apps that get used once and then forgotten.