![]() ![]() Jackson may be angling for an Apple acquisition. The problem is, the more places personal data flies, the harder it becomes to hold companies accountable for bad behavior - including inevitable breaches. To him, any third party that collects and retains our data is suspect unless it also has pro-consumer privacy policies like limiting data retention time and anonymizing data Second, clear consumer protection policies. With literally thousands of trackers transmitting data, it’s simply not practical for anyone to monitor that traffic and figure out which uses are legitimate and which aren’t. biggest concern is transparency: If we don’t know where our data is going, how can we ever hope to keep it private? But there is legitimate cause for concernīut Jackson does make two good points about app trackers. If we want those things to continue to be free, it’s in our interests to at least have the ads we see be relevant ones. App trackers play a key role in software quality.Īd-serving: Yep, no-one likes ads ( well, maybe some), but whatever we think of them, they make it possible to enjoy everything from free apps to free websites. ![]() Features that are used frequently can be prioritized for enhancement over ones that aren’t, and there are in-app behaviors that can identify problems with the functionality or user interface. ![]() Indirect user benefit: The more an app developer can learn about the way that real users interact with their app in the real world, the better they can make the app. Immediate user benefit: Many ecommerce and credit card apps use a variety of signals to detect fraudulent transactions, for example, and it’s in all our interests to block misuse of our cards. That Uber or Lyft car can only collect you if it knows where you are, for example. Necessity: some apps need to be sending tracking data in order to function. There are several answers to that first question. Why should it even leave your phone? Why should it be collected by someone when you don’t know what they’re going to do with it?” says Patrick Jackson, a former National Security Agency researcher who is chief technology officer for Disconnect “I know the value of data, and I don’t want mine in any hands where it doesn’t need to be,” he told me. Second, the Privacy Pro app that The Washington Post was using to monitor the tracker traffic was provided by a company that would like to sell you in-app purchases to block this traffic, so the company concerned has a vested interest in making the situation sound scarier than it is. It’s simply developers using app analytics services provided by these companies, and they are learning things like which app features people do and don’t use. ![]() App trackers in contextįirst, while there is much breathless reporting of data being sent to companies like Google and Facebook, the vast majority of it is innocuous. The report does need to be viewed in context, however. That’s half of an entire basic wireless service plan from AT&T. According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. In a single week, I encountered over 5,400 trackers, mostly in apps, not including the incessant Yelp traffic. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. Your iPhone probably is doing the same - and Apple could be doing more to stop it. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Monitoring software used by The Washington Post on an ordinary iPhone found that no fewer than 5,400 app trackers were sending data from the phone – in some cases including sensitive data like location and phone number. ![]()
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