The modern smartphone became a tool without which we can’t imagine our daily life, and because of this the smartphone or smart device became an important source of revenue for companies who collect personal information from users with or without their approval. To put it simple, your smartphone is spying on you constantly.
Personal information is usually collected protecting the identity of a user, they are anonymous data sets used for better serve ads, content, for future development of apps and all that. But according to the New York Times, the data is not quite anonymous or generic as most of the advertising companies or app publishers claim.
The New York Times journalists discovered that no less than 75 companies that receive personal data from a smartphone, tablet or other smart device use personal data in other ways.
The apps are not malware, or something like that, they are practical apps that most of you may use. Apps like weather forecasts, news which require access to the user’s location to provide more relevant information accordingly. These location data are sent further to the developer and sold to companies who can do whatever they want to do with them.
The New York Times was able to use this kind of data to get detailed information about the daily routine of an user, including children. A specific name was not assigned to a person, just the location, but since they can track one’s daily routine and the time spent at a certain location, discovering the identity of the user can be very simple.
These kind of apps and the developed economy created around them will not go away anytime soon because if they disappear they will take with them billions of dollars.
So what to do to make sure your smartphone is not spying on you?
Well the answer is not that simple as you can’t really block your smartphone from doing this. First thing you can do is to limit location access for your apps even if it mentions that the information it collects is used for the app to function better.
But even so, there is still a problem, especially if you use an Android based device. Google uses a phone’s location constantly according to its proximity to a Wi-Fi network, even if the Wi-Fi function is disabled, and your phone is sitting on a table doing nothing. Apple does the same thing, but in a less aggressive way.
Fortunately, at least in Europe, there is a ray of hope against this. Smartphone manufactures earned the right to make smart devices without using the native Android from Google, but using custom OS variants that will, maybe, stop this spying. Time will tell what comes next and if they decide to continue spying or stop it all together.
Not convinced that your smartphone is spying on you, and you might think this is just paranoia? Check the video below to see a detailed explanation of this obsession with data collection:
