Cloakers

When you give an app permission to access location data, it is usually for a sensible reason – for example an app that lets you find where you parker your car. So you allow it to do its thing.

What you don’t realise is that your location data is valuable, and there is a good chance the app developer will sell that data to whoever wants it.

And this could be the location of your children being tracked…

In the decade since Apple’s App Store was created, Americans have, app by app, consented to just such a system run by private companies. Now, as the decade ends, tens of millions of Americans, including many children, find themselves carrying spies in their pockets during the day and leaving them beside their beds at night — even though the corporations that control their data are far less accountable than the government would be.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html

Today, it’s perfectly legal to collect and sell all this information. In the United States, as in most of the world, no federal law limits what has become a vast and lucrative trade in human tracking. Only internal company policies and the decency of individual employees prevent those with access to the data from, say, stalking an estranged spouse or selling the evening commute of an intelligence officer to a hostile foreign power.

A key factor in all of this is that the data is anonymised. The location data is not attached to your name or your cell number. However there is a kink in the armour of that anonymity – nobody else visits your home and work every day. And the more well-known the person, the easier it is to join the dots.

Protestors can be tracked…

Companies say the data is shared only with vetted partners. As a society, we’re choosing simply to take their word for that, displaying a blithe faith in corporate beneficence that we don’t extend to far less intrusive yet more heavily regulated industries. Even if these companies are acting with the soundest moral code imaginable, there’s ultimately no foolproof way they can secure the data from falling into the hands of a foreign security service. Closer to home, on a smaller yet no less troubling scale, there are often few protections to stop an individual analyst with access to such data from tracking an ex-lover or a victim of abuse.

The solution is simple, if you can be bothered. Have a 2nd phone, that is never turned on within a mile of your home. Use it for all those location-based apps that you think your need. And turn it off at a set place on the way home, preferably some random home.