133
NSA Warns iPhone And Android Users—Disable Location Tracking
(www.forbes.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
133 points (100.0% liked)
Cybersecurity
6101 readers
256 users here now
c/cybersecurity is a community centered on the cybersecurity and information security profession. You can come here to discuss news, post something interesting, or just chat with others.
THE RULES
Instance Rules
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- No Ads / Spamming.
- No pornography.
Community Rules
- Idk, keep it semi-professional?
- Nothing illegal. We're all ethical here.
- Rules will be added/redefined as necessary.
If you ask someone to hack your "friends" socials you're just going to get banned so don't do that.
Learn about hacking
Other security-related communities !databreaches@lemmy.zip !netsec@lemmy.world !securitynews@infosec.pub !cybersecurity@infosec.pub !pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub
Notable mention to !cybersecuritymemes@lemmy.world
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The problem is, I want location tracking. I want a piece of software to tell me where I left my headphones or my wallet. I want it to let me know that I left the house without my bag. I want to have a piece of software Tell me where I was 3 Thursdays ago at 7pm for what the date was The last time I went to a certain park. I want my navigation software to tell me that I need to make a left turn up ahead.
I just don't want Apple or Google to have that information.
My carrier and my ISP know where I am, that is unavoidable. They don't even need GPS to tell that they know where their assets are and they know which of their assets I'm connecting to. I am quite certain the NSA has access to that data as well.
IT'S JUST THE ADVERTISING ID. NOT THE LOCATE PHONE PART.
Brought to you buy jerks who haven't had their coffee yet and read TFA.
FTA, that TA linked to as it's source
They claim to have precise loc data, unless that's not what you meant
In this case, they took it from a marketing agency, who collected it from apps, who got it from the phones.
The "app" adds location services as a permission requirement. Then they add the API for the advertiser. When they app runs, it calls the API which gathers location data.
So you'd think you can just disable location services for the app.
But what happens when they end up stealing it from Waze, or Tile, or Apple. What happens when google just sells it to people?
The only reasonable option is to turn it off at the phone level. But even then, aGPS knows. Your Carrier knows.
To stop this from being a thing, it needs to be done from the ground up with a privacy respecting OS run by a privacy respecting company, serviced by a privacy respecting server.
so basically never.
Indeed.
Same as it ever was.
Google, Apple, etc selling the data is actually unlikely. They don't want other advertisers data to be as competitive as their own.
The smaller players though, get more profit selling data because they'll never compete with the giants on the targeted ads front.
I'mma drop this here.
There's the option of removing the main tracking framework, at least on Android (Play Services) or flashing a privacy respecting custom ROM. And Android has the "allow only during usage" option.