Have you realized how often your smartphone shares your location data (location = check-in) with various companies? More than 5000 times in just two weeks. This is a bit shocking, but it's true!
A recent study by security researchers at Carnegie Mellon reveals that a large number of smartphone apps are collecting location check-in related to you — far more than you might think.
The security researcher issued a warning about the fact: “Your location [data] has been shared 5,398 times by Facebook, startup GO EX, Groupon, and seven other apps in the past 14 days.”
During their study, researchers monitored 23 Android smartphone users for three weeks.
Week One – Participants were asked to use their smartphone apps as they normally would.
Week Two – An app 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:
apps Android track a user’s movements every three minutes.
Some Android apps tried to collect more data than needed.
Groupon, a deal-of-the-day app, asked for a participant’s coordinates 1,062 times over two weeks. The
Weather Channel, a weather app, asked for 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 end 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.
Source: secnews.gr
