Have you realized how often your smartphone shares your location data with various companies? More than 5000 times in just two weeks. This is a bit shocking, but it's true!
The security researcher issued a warning about the incident: “Your location [data] has been shared 5,398 times by Facebook, GO EX startup, Groupon, and seven other apps in the last 14 days.”
During their study, researchers monitored 23 Android smartphone users for three weeks.
- First week – Participants were asked to use their smartphone apps as they normally would.
- Week Two – An application called App Ops was installed to monitor and manage data from the apps they were using.
- Week Three – The research team began sending daily privacy nudges whenever an app requested location data related to users.
The researchers concluded:
- Some Android apps track the user's movements every three minutes.
- Some Android apps were trying to collect more data than needed.
- Groupon, a deal-of-the-day app, requested a participant's coordinates 1,062 times in two weeks.
- The Weather Channel, a “weather forecast” app, requested the device’s location an average of 2,000 times, or every 10 minutes.
Participants were unaware of how closely they were being tracked by different apps, and many were surprised by the final results.
With the help of App Ops privacy app, over the course of eight days, participants collectively reviewed app permissions 69 times, blocking 122 additional permissions for approximately 47 different apps.
Ultimately, the team believes that if a user decides to take privacy seriously on a daily basis, they will definitely go back to their privacy settings and limit the apps that track users more closely.
At iGuru, we have previously touched on this specific fact, namely, what permissions an application automatically obtains and how we can prohibit or limit it.
You can find this article here.
The images below are an example from my own smartphone. Which applications have access to the location… There are quite a few…
