With the recent stay-at-home orders for our and other's protection, there has been a new spotlight turned on to our private lives (arguably for our own good) as to where we are and how much we travel. Some company has been buying the location data of everyone and plotting how far we travel, from 60 feet to many miles, and using that as an indicator of how we have or haven't taken this seriously.
There were two national TV news snippets talking about this (that I saw) and a couple of local interviews with people who are in the security business, who said that these data are gathered by many apps on our phones, and if we want to know if that is happening, we need to read the fine print.
Well, come on guys, don't play wink-wink, cutsie-cutsie with us. I know Google and Apple has a clause that says you cannot rat on some other app that is harvesting these data (far too profitable to risk offending someone, and after all, they are the final arbitors of what goes on our phones, aren't they) but with the so called security experts they hire to run private software to monitor which apps are phoning home, and how much data are transferred off our phones at night when on charging stations, someone out there must know which apps these are.
I'm pretty concerned about folks I don't know having access to my location data. I have location turned off except for 911, but I suspect this is a false toggle that gives some mental comfort thinking you've shut it off when really it does zilch. And in the fine print that all these tracking experts refer to, there may be a line about thirty pages down that says, "we have the right to extract your location even if you have location function turned off, please press agree".
I know we live in a world where everyone wants everything for free, and all those little fees add up here and there, but I'm blaming this attitude for folks who want the very latest gizmo or social media fad, for nothing, to gleefully push the agree button.
Is there any remnant of a program that stays behind (I think they were ungraciously referred to as 'turds' by some) that once installed on your system, just can't be scrubbed, even if you get rid of something, but how would we know.
I will beat some of you to the punch by knocking out the reverse argument that if you haven't nothing to be ashamed of or caught doing, who cares who tracks you. Well, there are some of us old timers who do.
Does anyone know of a list of applications which do send back tracking data? Is there any program that is available to do what the security experts do in order to monitor what's really running in the background and what isn't?
I'm looking for any thoughts about this, and why the talking heads won't mention names once they find out what is harvesting and selling location data.
