Brands are seeking new ways to customize messages. A startup that gathers data on when you pick up your phone, or when you go out on a run, can help.

And don't forget to limit ad tracking. Advisory contains a host of recommendations.

Lemmy

For 35.000 kroner solgte britisk selskap data om bevegelsene til titusenvis av nordmenn.

Xiaomi is collecting users’ browser habits and phone usage, raising red flags for privacy researchers.

Isolate your Big Brother Apps. Contribute to PeterCxy/Shelter development by creating an account on GitHub.

App users will get a random request for a selfie and they have 20 minutes to upload it or else the police will pay them a visit

The FBI suggested that people stuck indoors during the coronavirus pandemic download its workout app, but users questioned why it collected so much data.

Gael Duval, the head of the /e/ mobile OS, shares the progress on his mission to create an open source Android fork that is free from Google.

Federal agencies have big contracts with Virginia-based Babel Street. Depending on where you've traveled, your movements may be in the company's data.

We know our digital devices are logging our every move, yet we still trust in Apple, Facebook and Android. What if we "unGoogled" ourselves and took back control of our data? Two startups hope we will do just that.

A year later. Getting by without a SIM card in my smartphone.

Two Times Opinion writers answer readers’ questions on their investigation into how companies track smartphone users and profit off their data.

ToTok, an Emirati messaging app that has been downloaded to millions of phones, is the latest escalation of a digital arms race.

The apps and companies profiting from your every movement.

What we learned from the spy in your pocket.

Just by downloading an app, you’re potentially exposing sensitive data to dozens of technology companies, ad networks, data brokers and aggregators.

Context

The idea that FaceApp is somehow exceptionally dangerous threatens to obscure the real point: All apps deserve this level of scrutiny.

New study reveals scary, sneaky tactics

Security researchers say they have uncovered a massive espionage campaign involving the theft of call records from hacked cell network providers to conduct targeted surveillance on individuals of interest. The hackers have systematically broken in to more than 10 cell networks around the world to d…

It used a Shazam-like technology to identify soccer games

Most phones that ship with Google’s Android operating system also come with a bunch of Google apps and services installed. But Android is open source software, so independent developers have been finding ways to de-Google Android for years. One of the more recent options comes from developer Gaël Duval and the /e/ Foundation. The /e/ …

Key points:

Seeing your favorite band live will probably cost you more in data than in dollars.

The privacy crisis Apple and Google need to fix—now

The tech giant records people’s locations worldwide. Now, investigators are using it to find suspects and witnesses near crimes, running the risk of snaring the innocent.

Objectives To investigate whether and how user data are shared by top rated medicines related mobile applications (apps) and to characterise privacy risks to app users, both clinicians and consumers.

Design Traffic, content, and network analysis.

Setting Top rated medicines related apps for the Android mobile platform available in the Medical store category of Google Play in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, and Australia.

Participants 24 of 821 apps identified by an app store crawling program. Included apps pertained to medicines information, dispensing, administration, prescribing, or use, and were interactive.

Interventions Laboratory based traffic analysis of each app downloaded onto a smartphone, simulating real world use with four dummy scripts. The app’s baseline traffic related to 28 different types of user data was observed. To identify privacy leaks, one source of user data was modified and deviations in the resulting traffic observed.

Main outcome measures Identities and characterisation of entities directly receiving user data from sampled apps. Secondary content analysis of company websites and privacy policies identified data recipients’ main activities; network analysis characterised their data sharing relations.

Results 19/24 (79%) of sampled apps shared user data. 55 unique entities, owned by 46 parent companies, received or processed app user data, including developers and parent companies (first parties) and service providers (third parties). 18 (33%) provided infrastructure related services such as cloud services. 37 (67%) provided services related to the collection and analysis of user data, including analytics or advertising, suggesting heightened privacy risks. Network analysis revealed that first and third parties received a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-6, range 1-24) unique transmissions of user data. Third parties advertised the ability to share user data with 216 “fourth parties”; within this network (n=237), entities had access to a median of 3 (interquartile range 1-11, range 1-140) unique transmissions of user data. Several companies occupied central positions within the network with the ability to aggregate and re-identify user data.

Conclusions Sharing of user data is routine, yet far from transparent. Clinicians should be conscious of privacy risks in their own use of apps and, when recommending apps, explain the potential for loss of privacy as part of informed consent. Privacy regulation should emphasise the accountabilities of those who control and process user data. Developers should disclose all data sharing practices and allow users to choose precisely what data are shared and with whom.

Eiere av Nokia 7 Plus kan i flere måneder ha fått sendt sensitive opplysninger til en server i Kina. Datatilsynet i Finland vurderer gransking etter NRKs avsløring.

Many major companies, like Air Canada, Hollister and Expedia, are recording every tap and swipe you make on their iPhone apps. In most cases you won’t even realize it. And they don’t need to ask for permission. You can assume that most apps are collecting data on you. Some even monetize…

A new start-up company called eelo wants to provide you with an alternative version of Android. What makes this different than the version of the mobile OS that you are familiar with is that this version is de-Google-ized. The goal is to allow users to have more privacy than they currently do with the Google Play Services version of the open source OS...

Nick Winke, a photographer in the Pacific northwest, was perusing internet forums when he came across a complaint that alarmed him: On certain Samsung Electronics Co. smartphones, users aren’t allowed to delete the Facebook app.

In a lawsuit on Thursday, the city attorney said tracking was used not just for local forecasts but also for commercial purposes like targeted marketing.

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, an investigative reporter for The Times, explains how reporters discovered some of the information mobile apps collect.

Smartphone apps track a staggering amount of data about our whereabouts every day. That data has become a hot commodity.

Dozens of companies use smartphone locations to help advertisers and even hedge funds. They say it’s anonymous, but the data shows how personal it is.

An idle Android smartphone sends user data back to Google servers nearly ten times more frequently as an Apple device sends data back to Apple servers.

Do you know what personal details your phone is sharing about you when you're not looking? We decided to try to find out for sure.

THREAD: I'm looking at a Huawei P20 from China, let see what can I found

ATM skimming is on the rise and getting more sophisticated.

The issue appears to be affecting Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 8 users.

Protect the nudes

The scandal erupted after one company claimed to be able to track any cell phone in the US "within seconds."

So-called ultrasonic beacons are becoming even more popular with marketers. Here's how to shut them out.

On May 16th, I found a vulnerability in the LocationSmart website which allowed anyone, with no prior authentication or consent, to obtain the realtime location of any cellphone in the US to within…

The company formed data-sharing partnerships with Apple, Samsung and dozens of other device makers, raising new concerns about its privacy protections.

Android phones gather your location data and send it to Google, even if you’ve turned off location services and don’t have a SIM card, Quartz reported today.

<Thread> Hi @WikoMobile 👋! Let's talk about the ApeSaleTracker and ApeStsMonths apps found in your phones. These apps are pre-installed system apps which send regularly and silently the user infos to a Chinese 3rd party called Tinno by HTTP or SMS without user consent

Targeted advertising is at the heart of the largest technology companies today, and is becoming increasingly precise. Simultaneously, users generate more and more personal data that is shared with advertisers as more and more of daily life becomes intertwined with networked technology. There are many studies about how users are tracked and what kinds of data are gathered. The sheer scale and precision of individual data that is collected can be concerning. However, in the broader public debate about these practices this concern is often tempered by the understanding that all this potentially sensitive data is only accessed by large corporations; these corporations are profit-motivated and could be held to account for misusing the personal data they have collected. In this work we examine the capability of a different actor -- an individual with a modest budget -- to access the data collected by the advertising ecosystem. Specifically, we find that an individual can use the targeted advertising system to conduct physical and digital surveillance on targets that use smartphone apps with ads.

Après le centre commercial parisien des Quatre Temps, c'est au tour du BHV de géolocaliser ses clients.

But what these services show us is even more alarming: US telcos appear to be selling direct, non-anonymized, real-time access to consumer telephone data to third party services — not just federal law enforcement officials — who are then selling access to that data.

We take a look at the analytics built into the OxygenOS, the flavour of Android built by phone manufacturer OnePlus.

Memari said he was working on a proposal for a bar that would install five tracking devices: one by the entrance, one on the roof, one near the cash register, and one in each of the bathrooms. That would allow the bar to know each person’s gender (from the bathroom trackers), how long they stay (“dwell time” is the official metric), and what they were there for (a drink outside or a meal inside). And targeted advertising for the pub could follow those people around London on Renew’s omniscient recycling bins.

detect.location - An easy way to access the user's iOS location data without actually having access

Facebook knows what millions of people do on their phones, even if they don’t actually use the social network, a new report claims.

The company is claimed to have been using data gathered from another firm for detailed insights on people’s app and website usage habits, such as which apps they use, how frequently they use them and even how long they use them for.

This information has also been used to shape Facebook’s product roadmap, and led to it buying WhatsApp and continuing to rip Snapchat’s Stories feature.

Abstract: No. We show that another option, called "Always allow scanning", when activated, makes a device send Wi-Fi frames which can be used to track this device, even if the Wi-Fi switch is off. This option is not clearly described in all Android versions, and sometimes even not deactivatable. Besides, the Google Maps application prompts the user to activate this option.

The AccuWeather application for iOS requests location access under the premise of providing users localized severe weather alerts, critical…

A security researcher has found that the popular weather app sends private location data without the user's explicit permission to a firm designed to monetize user locations.

DID you know that Google has been recording you without your knowledge?

We show that the MEMS gyroscopes found on modern smart phones are sufficiently sensitive to measure acoustic signals in the vicinity of the phone. The resulting signals contain only very low-frequency information (< 200 Hz). Nevertheless we show, using signal processing and machine learning, that this information is sufficient to identify speaker information and even parse speech. Since iOS and Android require no special permissions to access the gyro, our results show that apps and active web content that cannot access the microphone can nevertheless eavesdrop on speech in the vicinity of the phone.

Since I am not living in my home country, I frequently use two different SIM cards and prefer having a phone with dual-sim support. This limits your choice s...