Careful! Your phone is tracking you

A lot of people complain that their smartphones are invading their privacy and they have more to worry about than most realise.

Yes, your phone can be an annoying intrusion, allowing your employer and others to reach you whenever they want. But that device in your pocket is also spying on you and keeping detailed information by tracking and recording your movements to build up a record of where you have been and for how long.

It is no revelation that we are being monitored more than ever before thanks to new technology. If you’re in London you are very much on the grid as there is an estimated CCTV camera for every 14 people. As a society, we’ve become more tolerant to being monitored as it helps our security services to keep us safe.

Most of us know, for instance, that security services like the NSA or GCHQ have intercepted emails and phone calls and used “big data” monitoring techniques that allow them to know what we’re up to at all times. But what about the companies who actually manufacture our communication devices? Yes, we mean Apple, Samsung, Google, and HTC.

Your every movement

Whether you’re on Ios or Android, all smartphones have a feature that tracks where you have been and for how long. That means that if you know how to unlock somebody else’s phone and you know where to look for this information you can find out which bar or private address they have been at, and for how long. The manufacturers don’t need to unlock the phone top get this data – you are recording and sending it to them all the time. Apple claims that it does this just to learn which places are significant to you, and insists that the data is only stored locally.

Mike Feibus, principal analyst at FeibusTech, says that for the most part “those who watch us are in it for the money.”

“The most common thing going on in our phones is for marketing purposes. They’d like to understand where we go, what we like. Then the information feeds targeted ad campaigns.” That is not exactly what these tech companies openly admit to. They defend themselves by pointing out that the user has consented by signing their terms and conditions of usage but of course that little twist is dressed up in jargon and hidden so deep in the agreement that hardly anyone is aware that their phone is keeping tabs on them in this way.

Protect yourself

Don’t panic! You can turn these settings off and here is how to do it. If you have an iPhone you can turn this feature of by going to Settings and then privacy, location services, system services, frequent locations and turning it “off”. Android users can open the app drawer and then go to Settings, location, Google location settings, and “turn off location reporting and location history”. You can also delete your location history.

Now you know. The question of how much we can trust the leading tech companies with our personal information has been a hot topic ever since the inception of smart devices. The Chartered Institute of Marketing says that only 6% of consumers trust the technology sector to manage their personal information so a good starting point would be for more people to become aware of just what information about them is being recorded and used.

 

By Dominic Luca

 

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