Apps like Temu or TokTok. Or those cheap electronic devices where you have to download a questionable app and register an account. What exactly is being stolen and what is being done with it? Who is doing it? Why?
Apps like Temu or TokTok. Or those cheap electronic devices where you have to download a questionable app and register an account. What exactly is being stolen and what is being done with it? Who is doing it? Why?
I find the motion sensing and gps tracking to be the creepiest. Using motion sensing they can know when you put your phone down and pick it up, if it was screen down or face up, and knows when you are walking, running, driving, etc. Combined with GPS it can be used to pretty accurately judge when you wake up, where you go, and how you get there. Lots of apps also don’t “close” when you swipe it away, they continue running in the background, so if you have the setting “only collect data when using the app” it will still collect data until you close it in the background or force stop it.
It is even worse than that. Given the list of data you have provided it is actually possible to discern general activity. You can determine if you are playing video games, working out, watching TV, out on a date, hanging with friends. As long as your phone is in your possession, the patterns for every behavior have a distinct fingerprint for each person. With enough collection, they can be filtered and categorized.
Source: I am an analytical statistician.
That’s true, although I believe you still have to give permission to an app to use this (at least on Android). Not to say that people won’t accept things way too fast.
The enhanced permission api was a huge step forward but plenty of apps still just demand permissions up front and lock you out until you grant them
To your last point, yes. The average user doesn’t even glance at the permissions before blindly accepting them. It is also true that an alarmingly high number of users/consumers /don’t care/ about basic privacy concerns that affect things like targeted ads, PII, and information that could be used to affect things like credit score.