An article on NY Times has claimed that week that many apps from both iOS and Android were passing an approximate location of the users without their knowledge to some 40 different companies.
The location of users is subjected for only studying of overall patterns and to test them but the NYT found out that these rules were tempered and many apps were leaking privacy of users with such a pinpoint accuracy that an individual can be easily tracked down. For instance, NYT came to know that a user living in upstate New York leaves the house daily at 7 A.M and the user commutes to a middle school which is 14 miles away and leaves from there in the mid-noon daily and not only that the apps was gathering the name of that user, her profession – Math’s teacher and age-46 years old.
Gizchina News of the week
An app was collecting her location every two seconds and she is not the only one, according to a report reviewed by NY Times, there are as many a million phones in New York.
The majority of apps they tested tracked precise locations, not just general areas. The test included around 20 apps which are already been flagged by researchers and mobile industry experts because of the personal data leaks. Out of 20 at least 17 apps shared the precise latitude and longitude of about 70 businesses.
One app WeatherBug on iOS was sharing an exact location of users to as many as 40 companies. Moreover, an app name theScore which is a sports app was asking users to share the location in order to track down teams and players that are relevant to you. Just not these random apps, a weather channel app owned by IBM sub-branch was also caught sharing location data without the user’s knowledge.
