From AAAS. The Privacy Arms Race Authors Software lets you use location-based apps without revealing where you are.
Whether they're looking for nearby restaurants, wondering what to wear, or finding the fastest route, most people allow their smart phones to send their GPS locations to Yelp, AccuWeather, or Google Maps without a second thought. But these data can be shared with advertisers and other third parties that profile users' movement patterns, often without their knowledge. Even anonymizing people's location data doesn't necessarily protect their privacy. Computer scientists are devising countermeasures. A slightly different camouflage strategy is to send dummy locations along with a user's real location. The downside of the strategy is that such dummy searches can result in embarrassment, says computer scientist Michael Herrmann of the University of Leuven in Belgium.
In the end, human movements are often so predictable that they are hard to conceal. La Cnil alerte sur la géolocalisation des applications smartphones. Une étude de la Cnil et de l’Inria montre que certaines applications sur smartphones font appel à la géolocalisation de façon quasi permanente.
Meet Jack. Or, What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data. By Jay Stanley Dec. 5, 2013 We now know that the NSA is collecting location information en masse.
As we’ve long said, location data is an extremely powerful set of information about people. To flesh out why that is true, here is the kind of future memo that we fear may someday soon be uncovered: UPDATE: Watch the video version of this piece here. Dear commissioner: Now that we have finalized our systems for the acquisition and processing of Americans’ location data (using data from cell phone and license plate readers as well as other sources), I wanted to give you a quick taste of our new system’s capabilities in the domestic policing context. As you can see in this screen shot from our new application, an individual by the name of Jack R. First, before we look into that alert, the system lets us quickly access a variety of background information about our subject.
A sense of the subject’s movements over time can also be graphically displayed: Or as a heat map: Looks like Mr. For Mr.
Web Photo Geotags Can Reveal More Than You Wish. Smartphones could soon reveal a person's every move. IN the not-too-distant future, advertisers will no longer have to ask - they will know.
When you will have to refuel on the Pacific Highway. That you like lite milk at home but soy in your coffee at the cafe you frequent on the way to work. That your favourite restaurant is the Indonesian around the corner from where you live, and that you are in the market for a leather sofa. If a single company or service knew all this you might have cause for concern or celebration, depending on how much you value your privacy. If you do value it, it might be time to ditch your mobile phone. For the mobile phone is fast becoming the up-close-and-personal marketing medium. Advertisement The ability to combine a person's location at any given time with which websites or mobile applications they have visited on their smartphone's browser is opening a new world of possibilities for marketers. Within three years the number of internet searches made through mobile phones will outstrip those via computers.