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There’s a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone’s Location Data
- andrewljohnson 5y agoIt's more like a trillion dollar market. The actual players are Google, Facebook, and Apple... these startups are just location data gnats. Location data is probably the single best demographic info to have to make money, and at least 3 companies in the world have basically everyone's phone bugged. Ads, maps, social... all totally dependent on location data from users.
- harlanji 5y agoWhen I lived in my car in SF a waymo would pass me right when I left and at many key intersections and at my destinations. I know it was not random but I don’t go down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how they did it. If I get proof then I’d be vindicated. I tweeted about it as a human rights violation often, having no way to retreat. I long ago took it as a given that we have no privacy. I can only imagine where the data comes from and goes and how it is augmented. Why would they care about me? Anti-terrorism, anti-competition, who knows. I tried not to think that much about it. I simply noticed the extreme regularity and improbability if it and thought in those terms and went about my limited life. The vans are very menacing with their spinning sensors and black helmet, I’d hate to have been an actual criminal. Built charachter ignoring them.
- Frost1x 5y agoHow could it not be random, dare I ask? I don't agree with the current directions of technology in terms of surveillance and data collection for private and powerful interests, but I find it far more likely that living in SF you'd be exposed to more mobile Waymo platforms that just happen to be collecting data regularly as part of engineering work, data collection, testing, and so on. No offense but why would Waymo care about you in particular unless you were some significantly important/critical former disgruntled employee or risk/potential asset to their business?
- salawat 5y ago...No man, they weren't tracking you... They were just testing their equipment to track everyone better! Absolutely surreal the mental gymnastics some are capable of convincing themselves to be comfortable with. Sometimes the problem is that the technology is being applied at all. The fact every techbro hides behind "Pfft, it ain't you we're interested in," doesn't quash the unspoken "it's everyone and you".
- shmatt 5y ago...or you were both using GMaps/Waze to navigate to your destination
- ajb 5y agoIt's good that you are managing to ignore these. However, while is common knowledge that Google collects data on everyone, informed opinion seems to be that they do so on a wholesale basis rather than having their vans follow individuals, which would likely be prohibitively expensive. You may want to think about the possibility that you are having some symptoms of one of the mental health problems which cause paranoia. If so, it may be a good idea to get it checked out, as they can be really hard to deal with once set in.
- quickthrowman 5y agoI understand you went through a very difficult experience being homeless, but I can assure you that Google isn’t interested in you in particular. Google casts a wide net when it collects data, having Waymo vehicles and vans following you (or any other single person) would be rather expensive. They collect data on all of us, just not quite as actively as physical surveillance. I’ve been in a survival frame of mind before and it can feel like the whole world is against you. It’s hard to trust anyone. Living in a car in SF (or any city) would give me massive anxiety, there’s no “safe place” where you can fully let your guard down. I know you don’t want to hear this, and have probably heard it before, but your paranoia may be a sign of untreated mental illness. Stress can trigger mental health issues, and treatment may help. I also understand that the medications have some pretty bad side effect profiles, and being labeled mentally ill means you get treated completely different than everyone else (in healthcare in particular) I also understand that your experience of feeling surveilled felt very real to you, the hard part of treating the disorders is that it’s hard to accept what you experience isn’t real, since it’s very real to you. I encourage you to consider seeking help, but understand why you’d be hesitant. Take care.
- zz865 5y agoIts good because that is what is paying for all these apps.
- isoprophlex 5y agoNo. It is cancerous, because it erodes our privacy and degrades our user experience. And for developers, you are forced to enter the spy-on-your-users rat race because everyone expects free shit.
- randmeerkat 5y ago> And for developers, you are forced to enter the spy-on-your-users rat race because everyone expects free shit. I would happily pay for a quality product that respected my privacy.
- isoprophlex 5y agoYeah, me too; i have paid email, paid adblocking dns. I de-googled my life and ditched FB, insta, twitter. (Ok, that I also did for my own mental well-being) But I'm, what, a 0.1% minority of global internet users? Meanwhile I try to find suitable games for my kids to play or video's to watch, and 9 out of 10 things I find have monetize through some quality-reducing, interruptive, annoying ad-driven modus operandi. It's not just services or software: consuming content is equally degraded by the expectation of limitless quantities of free shit.
- ameister14 5y agoThat's not why people enter the race, in my experience. I remember years back talking to friends and people I knew who all said things like 'think of the data we're collecting' - nobody thought about asking the end user if they wanted that data collected. It's not about 'oh no, I have to spy on my users;' the users aren't considered at all. If they are, there are patterns built to prevent them noticing and limit liability. It's pretty vile. Ethically, you should only try collect the data you reasonably believe your users would be ok with you collecting if they knew as much as you did about what a bad actor could do with it, and you should ask them first.
- tpmx 5y agoDuh, both EU+US needs groundbreaking legislation in this area. I guess US is not as motivated as the EU, so, they'll follow, as usual.
- Animats 5y agoCan you buy location data for all registered lobbyists?
- White_Wolf 5y agoI'll chip in if it contains the unregistered ones in there. I'd trade my flat for all transactions involving everyone in the medical field (in UK) for the past 4 years(including relatives and friends). If only location data is available... I'll do with that.
- quicklime 5y agoWhy the medical field?
- matheusmoreira 5y agoI'd also like full location data for all the politicians who allow this to happen. US three letter agency employees. All powerful people in general.
- bojangleslover 5y agoI would actually chip in fairly seriously for this!
- klabb3 5y agoThis is actually a great hacktivism idea! It could include all influential people who are enablers of today's system, such as regulators and politicians. Is it legal to publicly disclose this data, or is it only legal to collect and sell it? The one potential obstacle is that the shady 3p data brokers might refuse to sell it if they smell the purpose.
- cblconfederate 5y agoto lobby for what
- swiley 5y agoDo not cary smartphones.
- sneak 5y agoDumbphones have the exact same problem, due to carrier-based location tracking tied to phone number.
- jacquesm 5y agoNot nearly to the same degree of confidence/precision and without easy access by Google/Apple/Facebook/Advertising networks to this data.
- Gigachad 5y agoThey are accurate to the tower which is far too accurate for comfort.
- jsjohnst 5y agoFor someone as active on HN as you, I’m surprised you don’t know of the numerous stories in the past about carriers selling location data to advertising networks and the numerous cases where the raw data has leaked publicly via careless aggregators[0]. Like even Congress got fired up on it at the time because of leaks, but you can be assured it’s still happening[2] despite claims otherwise. As to the precision argument, US cell carriers can locate you to within 150ft easily in a city / populated area (and are required to be able to by the FCC[1]). They don’t just depend on multiple tower triangulation, but use much more advanced techniques (can provide sources if asked). Back in 2017 multiple carriers were demonstrating to my then employer how they could generally even determine what floor you were on in a building within a range of 4-5 floors. Apparently now the FCC mandates it to be within 10ft[1] vertical accuracy now in the top 25 markets. The same PRS system that tracks a UEs precise location for E911 / law enforcement / government use / etc is also used on tracking the general usage of any customer of the carriers all the time. [0] one story among many from back then: https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-19-verizon-stop-selling-customer-location-data-aggregators.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-19-verizon-stop-selling-cus... [1] https://www.fcc.gov/public-safety-and-homeland-security/policy-and-licensing-division/911-services/general/location-accuracy-indoor-benchmarks https://www.fcc.gov/public-safety-and-homeland-security/poli... [2] https://www.locationsmart.com/ https://www.locationsmart.com/
- HanaShiratori 5y agoNo need to pay me that much, I'd be willing to sell for a couple million. Just pm me
- amelius 5y agoMultibillion divided by billions of users = a couple of dollars. Yes, a couple of dollars per user is what is at the root of this privacy nightmare. And guess who is ultimately paying this price anyway.
- novok 5y agoCarriers chase the god of ARPU like their lives depend on it, and this ARPU gain is pure profit.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- findthewords 5y agoNo surprise that Android begs the user to enable location data with popups that can't be turned off.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y agoThere are many versions of Android, and some that don't do this. Check out: CalyxOS GrapheneOS LineageOS AOSP
- Rd6n6 5y ago> How can I stop companies from getting my location data? The steps they list only cover gps data. In my final year at uni, during the capstone fair, I recall one group built a tracking system that relied on Bluetooth or wifi or something (maybe cellular signals?) to identify and track people indoors. I think they pitched it to be used in malls or airports, but really could work anywhere. It was surprisingly robust. There are other projects that track you by license plate on highways, or by facial recognition. All this is location data too. I don’t think a highly motivated person could avoid location tracking any more without living in the woods
- rufus_foreman 5y ago>> How can I stop companies from getting my location data? Can't you just turn that off? Am I missing something?
- estaseuropano 5y agoYou don't need to send location data to reveal it. E.g. WiFi signal strength of different devices and cell tower strength or switching are easy points to help locate someone. Google was already prohibited from collecting WiFi data in the EU (with streetview cars specifically, but what would stop them from using any android device...), you can bet they still do it in the rest of the world.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoI'm not on wifi, mostly I'm on a desktop computer with a VPN. I'm not an expert, how much of my location data gets sent when I do that.
- nerdponx 5y agoI once read that Apple and Google actively keep track of Wifi access points so they can map out interior spaces, and also geolocate you even if you have GPS location services disabled. I don't know if that's true, but I wouldn't put it past them.
- sys_64738 5y agoHow does data get off my smartphone? * Apps * Carrier geolocation * Bluetooth tracking Are there any others? If I disable location tracking then am I safe? I don't install crappy vendor apps on my smartphone to begin with.
- sneak 5y agoYou'll need a new SIM and handset every couple months, too.
- novok 5y agoCarrier geolocation is there whether you like it or not and at this point I think legislation is the only solution to making location logs illegal to keep for governments and companies. It's not really being created by your smartphone but more like observed by the carriers cell phone towers so they can do handoffs and a side effect of how the network layer works. Also stuff like iBeacon is pretty much impossible to avoid, it still works even when bluetooth is completely turned off. I got an iBeacon based alert when I walked into an apple store with bluetooth turned off for example, and there is no setting to turn off iBeacon tracking. Google is worse in other ways, it's incredibly infuriating.
- jmkb 5y agoCertainly the phone manufacturer (and OS provider if different) can have a go at anything they want. I'm not sure what all counts as "getting data off" the phone, but some other methods of smartphone tracking: - wifi (sometimes even if wifi is "off") - EXIF on photos you take and share - QR code usage - public USB charging ports Then there's cross-tracking by other means. It's likely someone has enough data to associate your phone with your credit or debit accounts, or a public transit card, or vehicle plate numbers & toll tags, or with your face and voice.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mleonhard 5y agoIP address. Most people connect to wifi at home and at work. Every app on your phone reports your current IP address. Even if you don't open an app, the app server can send it a silent push notification which wakes up the app and lets it send back your current IP address. Therefore every app knows where you live and work and when you are at those places. If you connect to wifi at friends' places or coffee shops or a hotel, they get that data, too. This is missing from the article. It is a major omission. iOS & Android could help reduce IP-address tracking. They could treat Internet Access as a privacy setting: require apps to ask for permission and let the user control when the app communicates (never, when in use, always). One can disable app notifications to reduce app wake-ups, but the OS does not teach users about this. Notifications are not listed under "Privacy". Also, apps can use other ways to wake up frequently and report the current IP address. Additionally, iOS & Android could support hermetic proxy services. Currently, one can install a VPN app on iOS, but device traffic goes through the VPN only when the app is running and connected. All apps get direct access to the network (and your IP address) whenever the VPN connection is not enabled, which occurs during device restarts, VPN service outages, VPN app updates, and when switching between mobile & wifi. iOS has the ability to disable network access when the VPN is down, but setting it up is a complicated procedure which requires using a macOS device and wiping the iOS device. And there's no emergency-disable option. Both Apple and Google ignore many easy things they could do to improve user privacy.
- barathr 5y agoThis is a layered problem; Apple and Google (for better and worse) are best positioned to deal with the app ecosystem. But there's the mobile provider piece of this -- the tower knows where you are because currently it has to, and the network providers are part of this location data market, selling location data for everyone, whether they use leaky apps or not. This is worse with 5G due to smaller cells and thus finer-grained location data. With a colleague I've founded a startup, Invisv, to provide location privacy -- and more. FWIW, Wired wrote up our work on this several weeks back: https://www.wired.com/story/pretty-good-phone-privacy-imsi-wireless-carriers/ https://www.wired.com/story/pretty-good-phone-privacy-imsi-w...
- eurasiantiger 5y agoOpen source radios are the first step to privacy. We need to be able to choose the towers we connect to.
- gruez 5y ago>We need to be able to choose the towers we connect to. How does that help? If you do that the best you can do is obfuscate your location by a mile.
- DSingularity 5y agoThat’s pretty good
- secondcoming 5y agoWhen Google does share location information with advertisers it is obfuscated to approx this range.
- carlhjerpe 5y agoMy personal understanding of this...... Show is that they never share my actual data but rather allow advertisers to target me based on these parameters, and if the advertiser is specific enough and get me to click I could potentially be identified by the ad. Please prove me right.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoIt's baffling that this information is worth so much. I'm curious as to what marketing is being custom sent to me based on the location data they get from me. I actually leave me phone at home most of the time if I'm going to the store or a nearby restaurant but I always take it with me when I go hiking. Even though I turn it off at the trailhead to save the battery in case I need it later, I'm sure I'm identified in some database somewhere as a person who goes hiking, but then what? I'm already an REI member. Maybe environmental groups could send me political and fund raising pleas (they don't but I guess they could).
- hogFeast 5y agoIt is mainly used by hedge funds. I have heard it is used by some marketing firms, I have heard that some corporates use it for data on their own properties/competitors (the former may not be obvious, but some malls may do this to check on tenants, malls also usually have their own tracking stuff on site too btw) but the main user are hedge funds. Not all of this data is useful by itself but it is useful once you integrate it with everything else (lots of firms have tried to use this data on it's own, and then complained it "doesn't work" when they employ no-one who actually understands the restaurant business, for example). Also, I will say too...99% of this data is coming from free apps whose only purpose is to harvest data from the unwitting. I don't understand fully how this is possible because, presumably, it should be quite obvious to App Stores that a flashlight app does not need to know your location...but it keeps happening. Some of the big data aggregators are actually pretty creepy, I have seen some companies retailing personalised data on every person in the US, I don't think anyone knows where it is all coming from apart from them (I also wouldn't discount hacking tbh, there is so much money in this that I think they have to be doing it). Imo, all this shit should be blocked. Even within hedge funds, you are seeing funds that are using this data, no-one knows where it comes from, how it was collected, and they making piles of money from it but no-one else can access it...they just call up a firm, tell them they will pay $50m/year if you don't sell this to anyone else, it is all very opaque.
- jrochkind1 5y agoWhat do hedge funds do with location data?
- JumpCrisscross 5y agoDo any of the U.S. carriers not do this?
- tonetheman 5y agoIf someone would pay me I will just share my location data... wonder how many people are like myself.
- etaioinshrdlu 5y agoDoes anyone know of an API I can use to test this on my own phone number? Does this exist, but require a boatload of money and contracts first?
- iab 5y agoI’ll sell it for significantly less - 200mm for all my location data