An investigation by the New York Times into the shadowy world of
location-data brokerages found a whole menagerie of companies from IBM,
Foursquare and the Weather Channel to obscure players like Groundtruth,
Fysical and Safegraph, who pay app vendors to include their tracking
code in common apps.
These apps sometimes disclose that they will track your location for ad
personalization or to “improve service,” but they don’t generally reveal
that they are beaconing your location to ad brokers you’ve never heard
of, sometimes as often as once a minute, and that this data can be
easily traced back to individuals (say, by looking for phones that go
from your home address to your job five days a week), and that it is
sometimes retained indefinitely.
The Times found evidence of children, public officials, and people with
sensitive addiction, health, and employment situations being tracked in
fine detail by these ad brokers.
For their part, the brokers say that this is merely service being traded
for data, and blame users for not realizing that all this secretive,
creepy shit is happening all the time.
In an accompanying guide
to reducing location tracking, the Times suggests going through
app-by-app location permissions but also points out that this kind of
data marketplace is essentially unregulated.
