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Information collection, location tracking & user awareness

Document Citado por Related
Vincent
AutorEllen Marie Nadeau
Páginas215-216

Page 215

See note 88

As companies around the globe are tracking data online, it’s important for Latin American users to understand the steps they can take to protect their own privacy.

The past few weeks, articles regarding mobile tracking have been circulating the Internet. New technology connects the tracking of users’ mobile app behavior with their web behavior, which impacts user privacy as this wealth of collected personal information is aggregated to produce one all-too-comprehensive view of phone and Internet use.

While this particular technology has received a great deal of attention, it is all-too-common for our mobile phones to collect mass amounts of our data. Other apps don’t receive as much publicity as Google, so users generally aren’t as familiar with what information is being collected and by whom. This was illustrated in a 2013 study by Carnegie Mellon, which mapped user expectations with privacy and security risks of mobile applications. Out of the most popular 100 Android apps, 56 collect device ID, contact lists and/or location. One of the most shocking was Brightest Flashlight – 95% of study participants were surprised that this app collected such signiicant amounts of data. The lack of awareness by users shows that there needs to be a signiicant shift in understanding – especially since the ability to monitor and turn off the tracking settings lies completely in users’ hands. iPhone makes it relatively simple to adjust setting. To learn which apps on an iPhone are tracking location, there’s a simple process:

1 Open phone’s "Settings"

2 Go to "General"

3 Choose "Background App Refresh"

On this page, one can monitor which apps are tracking user location by looking for a blue arrow next to the application name. Turning off an iPhone’s location services will block active tracking. In addition to this,

Page 216

it’s important to disable passive tracking in order to prohibit apps from determining location through connections with Wi-Fi networks.

On any type of phone, privacy policies also appear when one chooses to download a new mobile app. In order to fully understand what information one is sharing, it’s imperative to pay close attention to these settings. The US Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on these privacy policies to ensure that they are extremely transparent for users to make well-informed decisions. This is exempliied by the charges FTC brought against "Brightest Flashlight Free" for failing to...

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