Do You Have Any Idea What Happens When You Give an App Your Geolocation?

An article in The Markup, “There’s a multibillion-dollar market for your phone’s location data”, reveals the murky structures that allow the geolocation data we users generate from applications to end up being shared with all sorts of unexpected players, blatantly violating our privacy.

The networks of companies dedicated to exploiting users’ data has been extensively studied, showing how applications of all kinds, from something as simple as a weather app to those we use for exercise, urban mobility, photography and much more, are part of a vast market in which our data is exchanged without our knowledge. The app controls recently introduced by Apple in the operating system of its devices have improved the situation somewhat, but it is still far from being under control.

How is it possible that the data you generate when you go out, for example, to exercise, whose only purpose is to help you visualize your route on a map, ends up being seen by the authorities or in the hands of companies that sell and resell them to be able to estimate your value as a customer, to help brands target you, and who knows for what other purposes? At some point, when you accepted the terms and conditions of service of an app and saw that it requested permission to use your geolocation, you assumed that the app’s operation was based on geolocation, so it could know where you were going, how fast you were running or the inclines involved, and you decided — assuming you devoted more than a nano-second’s thought — to authorize. However, the conceptual leap from “use my geolocation to inform me about this” to “use my geolocation for whatever you want and sell it to the highest bidder” should never have been allowed to happen.

The conditions of geolocation data needs to be much, much better explained. One thing is for me to allow a transportation app to know my location, but for that app to interpret that as permission to sell the data I have generated is a very different, essentially illicit, thing.

The so-called data industry has grown without our knowledge, and most people would be outraged if they knew the extent of it. As said, using aggregated, anonymous data to generate heat maps, information on the movement of passers-by, vehicle traffic flows or countless other utilities, is not the same as creating detailed profiles of us and then selling them to companies to do what they please with.

This ‘industry’ not only needs to be shut down, but the people involved prosecuted. If the only way to make an app economically viable is by deceiving its users and commercializing their privacy, that app should not exist. It is high time the authorities took action to shut down this nefarious activity.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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