A new report might make you more skeptical about allowing apps to track your location. Apparently, the user’s phone location data is a huge market, in which information is sold to the highest bidder in market that is estimated to be worth a whopping 12 billion US Dollars.
According to TheNextWeb, there are multiple data mining firms that collect location data along with other identifiers anonymously and then sell it to other companies that require it. The data is bought from various firms including retail foot traffic analysts to even military contractors. Serge Egelman, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute and CTO of AppCensus stated that “apps can circumvent the permission model and gain access to protected data without user consent by using both covert and side channels.”
Similarly, Justin Sherman, a cyber policy fellow at the Duke Tech Policy Lab added that There isn’t a lot of transparency and there is a really, really complex shadowy web of interactions between these companies that’s hard to untangle. They operate on the fact that the general public and people in Washington and other regulatory centers aren’t paying attention to what they’re doing.” The Markup even identified 47 companies that harvest, sell, or trade in mobile phone location data.
Notably, one of the location data brokers Oracle, has a partner that openly advertises data on millions of US individuals. This includes demographics information like personal activities and life preferences. Meanwhile Oracle, Epsilon, and others also explicitly advertises data sharing platforms to thousands of companies.
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