Popular map and ride-sharing apps need your location to work, but shouldn’t have free reign to track your every movement. One of the best ways to limit the ability of data collection is to limit the apps on your phone that are allowed to access your data and location. Check Your App Settings and Location Services

Here are four steps you can take to protect your data from unwanted tracking. Obviously, your personal data is at risk from this pervasive tracking, but there are ways to make it harder for these unfair players and to simply limit the collection of those who properly give you a way out. provides advertisers with information about your interests that can be used to serve more targeted ads. Navigation apps need it to select a route, and restaurant apps may request a location to suggest the nearest store.Īpps with and without legitimate needs for this information may attempt to collect it for profiling purposes. Some mobile apps have a legitimate need for location information, sometimes called geofencing. Additionally, devices that send traffic from the same IP address are likely to be related, providing additional data to advertisers. Mobile devices’ IP addresses can change frequently as they move from one network to another however, they can still provide valuable information to advertisers.įor example, browsing the web on Starbucks’ WiFi means that your device may be associated with that cafe’s IP address, providing information on your coffee drinking habits. The Internet uses IP addresses to route traffic from its source to its intended information. This data can then be used to build profiles of users that can be sold to advertisers for targeted advertising. The way that these organizations monetize this software is by collecting data from the applications that use their SDKs. SDKs are commonly provided by device manufacturers to developers for free.

By using an SDK, a developer can create apps faster and more easily than if they had to write the SDK-provided functionality themselves. They contain common functions that a developer may want to include in their applications and interfaces for interacting with a device’s hardware, operating system, and other software (such as social media). What’s more, sometimes the purpose of the app is nothing but a facade, and their main business is data collection!Ī software development kit (SDK) is a program provided by a company that is designed to make writing software easier. Usually, it is up to the user to find how and where to disable what they allow you to disable. The dirty little secret is… Most of the time these tracking services, or integrated app services, are -most of the time- hidden from the user and ON with no direct consent request. In a nutshell, there are little services logging your moves throughout the device/application, storing things such as usage tendencies, your searches, a digital print of your device to identify it, among other things. Some apps utilize services, like Amplitude, a behavioral analytics platform with over 600 customers -of the likes of Microsoft, Intuit, and Twitter-, to gather and analyze customer data. And, if you’re not hitched up to a wi-fi network, the transfer of all this data every night is costing you much more than your privacy! How Phone App Tracking WorksĪs a matter of fact, the tracking these apps or operating systems carry out works a lot like cookies. The amount of data these trackers upload from your phones can be huge. They build your persona and survey your commercial behavior, and then resell this data to marketing agencies or use it themselves to serve custom ads. Through your gadget, they collect, retain data for their own commercial benefit, or hand it over to the likes of Google, Nike, and other interested entities. What’s more, it’s not all about apps, iOS, and Android -as operating systems of your smartphones and iPhones- do this too. If you do a bit of research on application data collection will discover that many applications that serve purposes other than tracking, actually do track how, when, and where you use your phone constantly.

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