Late last year, Uber made a change to its app that let it track customers after their rides had ended. Many troubled months later, the company is finally walking back that tweak, and will once again let customers have more control over when their locations are used. [More]
location data
Supreme Court Will Decide If Your Mobile Phone Location Data Is Private
By 6.5.17 — Updated: 6.9.17
It’s a funny thing about the 21st century: Nearly all of us carry location trackers on us, voluntarily, every single place we go. They’re our phones, and we carry them with us when we shop, while we work, while we exercise, while we sleep, and even when we use the bathroom. And that leaves an incredibly valuable, intimate trail of location data that businesses use basically however they want. But as far as your legal rights are concerned, is that personal data actually private? [More]
Should Police Need A Warrant To Obtain Your Cellphone Location Data?
By 10.28.16 — Updated: 10.31.16
On TV and in the movies, when the police want location information on a suspect’s cellphone, the world-weary detectives just mosey into the office of a wireless company and bully/sweet-talk the receptionist into handing over this information by saying things like “You don’t want us to have to wait here while we get a warrant, do you?” In the real world, it’s not that simple, and the question of whether or not an actual warrant is needed has yet to be resolved. [More]
Study: Some Popular Android Apps Tracking User Location Once Every Three Minutes
By 3.24.15
While it can be very useful to have say, a weather app on your smartphone that knows where you are when you want to find out current conditions for your location, does that mean that those apps should be able to know where you are even when you aren’t using the app? That’s a question raised by a new forthcoming study that found about dozen apps for Android smartphones are not only tracking where you are right now, but three minutes from now. And three minutes after that. And so on. [More]
