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Entry 4 - Location, location, location...

The Anonymity of Location Services

The advent of the cell phone and subsequently the smartphone has put a world of knowledge at our fingertips. Recipes, maps, music and much more are just a few clicks away, whenever we want them, wherever we want them. This is great for productivity and connectivity, but herein lies the danger to our privacy.

Location services drive much of the functionality and enhance the user's experience on many of today's most popular apps, specifically social media applications. Apps encourage "checking in" and "tagging" people and locations attached to posts, and users often accept the risk of sharing their information because of "hyperbolic discounting", where people focus on the immediate benefit and discount future risk. (3) Some users chose to disable location services, an option that should theoretically make a user's location private, but recent studies show that this might be a false sense of security.

MIT news' Larry Hardesty writes:
"to extract the complete location information for a single person from an 'anonymized' data set of more than a million people, all you would need to do is place him or her within a couple of hundred yards of a cellphone transmitter, sometime over the course of an hour, four times in one year." (1)
Not only does this suggest that it is difficult to truly mask your location on your mobile device, but that even the data you access and store can be identified.

Relation to Computer Science

Tracing cell phones and uncovering personal data may seem super advanced, something left to the FBI or experienced hackers, but the truth is that even somebody with no training in computer science could potentially track your whereabouts thanks to location data. In another MIT study, researchers showed subjects a series of locations on a map, associated with somebody's tweets, in chronological order and asked them to deduce the person's work and home. With just location data, not even the tweet's content, 65 percent of subjects were able to successfully identify the tweeter's home. (2) So while turning of location services is a good first step to safeguard your location, always remember that you are never truly "off the grid" when there's a phone in your pocket.

References
(1) http://news.mit.edu/2013/how-hard-it-de-anonymize-cellphone-data
(2) http://news.mit.edu/2016/twitter-location-data-homes-workplaces-0517
(3) https://www.cs.cmu.edu/link/whos-peeking-your-personal-data


Comments

  1. Laughlin AsheNovember 12, 2017 at 7:18 PM

    Many applications today require your location for use, such as Maps, Find My iPhone, or Uber, and many others make it very useful to share your location, such as Weather, Snapchat, Camera, and Safari. So for convenience, sharing your location is all but a necessity in todays world. Do you think this trend will change? Should users be more skeptical of sharing their location or can they share it with blind trust that a large corporation like Apple or Google would not encroach on someone's privacy? When you buy a phone from Apple or sign a contract with AT&T, is your privacy a right or do you hand that over?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UnknownNovember 12, 2017 at 8:55 PM

      All great questions and definitely things major corporations and app developers alike should be looking into. Reading the T&C's of every company we essentially enter into a contract with when using their apps would take a lifetime. Nevertheless, I do see consumers becoming more aware and disillusioned to these sometimes shady practices.

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