Tag: Location Data

Data broker’s “staggering” sale of sensitive info exposed in unsealed FTC filing | Ars Technica

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One of the world’s largest mobile data brokers, Kochava, has lost its battle to stop the Federal Trade Commission from revealing what the FTC has alleged is a disturbing, widespread pattern of unfair use and sale of sensitive data without consent from hundreds of millions of people. US District Judge B. Lynn Winmill recently unsealed a court filing, an amended complaint that perhaps contains the most evidence yet gathered by the FTC in its long-standing mission to crack down on data brokers allegedly “substantially” harming consumers by invading their privacy.…

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Was Tim Hortons’ App Improperly Tracking Users? Privacy Commissioner To Decide | Global News

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Canada’s privacy commissioner will report Wednesday on the results of an investigation into whether the Tim Hortons mobile ordering app was improperly tracking users’ whereabouts without their explicit consent. The 23-month-long investigation came after National Post reporter James McLeod obtained data showing the Tim Hortons app on his phone had tracked his location more than 2,700 times in less than five months. Read full story here: Was Tim Hortons’ App Improperly Tracking Users? Privacy Commissioner To Decide | Global News

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Google And Apple Are Banning Technology For Sharing Users’ Location Data | The Verge

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You may have never heard of the company X-Mode Social, but its code may be in some of the apps on your phone, tracking and selling your location data. Now, Google and Apple are trying to put a stop to it. According to a Wall Street Journal article, the tech companies have told developers to remove X-Mode’s code from their apps, or risk getting them pulled from their respective app stores. X-Mode works by giving developers code to put into their apps, known as an SDK, which tracks users’ location and then…

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Tim Hortons App Under Investigation Over Data Concerns | CTV News

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GATINEAU, QUE. — The Tim Hortons mobile ordering app is being investigated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and provincial agencies in Quebec, B.C. and Alberta. The joint investigation was prompted by concerns raised in media reports about how the app may be collecting and using data about people’s movements as they go about their daily activities. It will examine whether the fast food restaurant chain owned by Restaurant Brands International Inc. is in compliance with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, Canada’s federal private…

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Facebook Begins Sharing More Location Data With COVID-19 Researchers And Asks Users To Self-Report Symptoms | The Verge

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The company’s Data for Good program is expanding. Facebook is expanding a program that grants researchers access to data about movement patterns in an effort to help improve our understanding of the spread of COVID-19, the company said today. Data for Good, which uses aggregated, anonymized data from Facebook’s apps to inform academic research, will now grant access to three new maps for forecasting the disease’s spread and revealing whether residents of a given region are staying at home. The company will also prompt Facebook users to participate in a…

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Google’s COVID-19 Location Data Shows Regions That Are Violating Lockdown Orders. | Engadget

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Google has unveiled the COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports in an effort to help public health officials understand how people are moving about in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The reports show location data from folks who have agreed to share their location history with Google in order to show places that are following instructions to shelter in place — or not. “As global communities respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increasing emphasis on public health strategies, like social distancing measures, to slow the rate of transmission,” wrote…

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Coronavirus Pandemic Changes How Your Privacy Is Protected | CNET

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Data protection officials around the world are loosening rules on how your data can be used during the COVID-19 outbreak. Privacy protections around the world are getting lifted during the coronavirus outbreak. As the coronavirus pandemic gets worse, privacy commissioners are lifting data restrictions for health officials to keep track of the outbreak. A review of policy changes around the world shows that data protection agencies are prioritizing lives over privacy, and it could be a sign of what’s to come for the US. In Hong Kong, the city’s privacy…

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Opinion – How To Track President Trump | The New York Times

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If you own a mobile phone, its every move is logged and tracked by dozens of companies. No one is beyond the reach of this constant digital surveillance. Not even the president of the United States. The Times Privacy Project obtained a dataset with more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million people in this country. It was a random sample from 2016 and 2017, but it took only minutes — with assistance from publicly available information — for us to deanonymize location data…

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Law Enforcement Taps Google’s Sensorvault For Location Data, Report Says | CNET

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Police have used information from the search giant’s Sensorvault database to aid in criminal cases across the country, according to a report Saturday by the New York Times. The database has detailed location records from hundreds of millions of phones around the world, the report said. It’s meant to collect information on the users of Google’s products so the company can better target them with ads, and see how effective those ads are. Read full story here: Law Enforcement Taps Google’s Sensorvault For Location Data, Report Says | CNET

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