Even the most absent-minded smartphone user is probably aware that apps keep tabs on where they go. Many apps wouldn’t work without location data. But few realize just how often that location tracking is happening—even when it’s not necessary, even when their apps aren’t being used, and, increasingly, even when a user isn’t even carrying their phone. Tracking you across the map isn’t always about improving user experience, of course, but rather about better understanding who you are and what kind of advertising to show you. If, for instance, a company knows that you’ve just stepped foot in one of their stores, they might start targeting you with ads touting a sale.
It’s hard to dispute the value of a good sale, but location tracking raises all sorts of privacy concerns. (Not to mention that using the GPS will drain your smartphone’s battery faster.) Should app makers know where we live, where our children go to school, where we go to get away from it all? And if so, how much should they tell us about it?
Those complicated questions help explain why the biggest tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Verizon, filed a pro-privacy amicus brief in last month’s Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States, in which they argued that police should have a warrant before accessing cell phone location data. After all, if we thought the police could easily access our data, we might start asking more questions about what our phones know about us, and become less comfortable with using these companies’ products.
But location tracking is quietly, sometimes surreptitiously, baked into the web’s modern data collection regime. According to a recent study by French research organization Exodus Privacy and Yale University’s Privacy Lab, more than three in four Android apps contain at least one third-party “tracker,” which uses various techniques to glean personal information, including location and in-app behavior, to better target users for advertisements and services. (In 2016, the FTC sued InMobi, a company that described itself as “the world’s largest independent mobile advertising company” because it tracked consumers’ location even if they denied permission.)
The trackers found by the Yale researchers include some of the most popular apps on the Google Play Store, including Tinder, Spotify, Uber, and OKCupid. Many of these apps rely on a service owned by Google, Crashlytics, that primarily tracks app crash reports, but can also provide the ability to “get insight into your users, what they’re doing, and inject live social content to delight them.” The researchers didn’t study iOS apps, but they warned that the problem may also exist on Apple’s App Store, noting that many of the tracker companies used on Android apps also distribute apps via Apple.
Even so-called anonymized location data—without our real-life name attached to it—can help paint a detailed portrait of a user and their habits, or even crack open their entire identity. Like the National Security Agency, which gathers billions of records a day on people’s cell-phone locations across the globe, developers realize there is a lot to be gleaned from users’ frequented locations and movement patterns. For app developers and ad targeters, this locational awareness is “the stuff of the future,” as one data scientist put it to me recently. Here’s how three of the largest companies are gathering your location, and what, if anything, you can do about it.
Apple: “A better user experience” and targeted ads
The company has been lauded by some for its emphasis on privacy. As Apple chief executive Tim Cook says in a letter at the company’s privacy webpage, “When we do ask to use your data, it’s to provide you with a better user experience.”
