<- Ad Injection: top ->
The protection of personal data from the beginning of this year has really become a popular topic. But when it comes to this subject, we must never forget to mention the CNIL working hard on this. This committee has just published results on the protection of private data including automatic location in smartphones running Android and iOS.
An application identifies the position its user once per minute
Protection of Privacy: automatic location in smartphones is concern
<- Ad Injection: random ->
The National Commission on Informatics and Liberties is still severe in the protection of privacy. There are a few weeks this committee in collaboration with the National Institute for Research in Computer and Control (INRIA) did a survey on the automatic geolocation activation in smartphones. According to their report, the majority of applications in the application online stores use a geolocation any means, there are those that require the user’s permission before using this tool but there are those that are activated automatically and even wear this tool many times per minute.
All this shows that smartphones so often monitor the position of these users via the built-in GPS and this without the knowledge of these last. INRIA and therefore alert the CNIL Apple and Google with their operating system but also the application developers. These two institutions still in the study showed that the majority of applications downloaded from the Play Store or the App Store or even a quarter or a third party all have a geolocation tool. According to the study there are some applications that access the geolocation not less than once a minute, something that is not normal at all.
Location data are used for advertising purposes
According to a research officer at the CNIL named Geoffrey Delcroix, the geolocation can result from improper configuration of the application but also can be express in order to collect the data and use them to make the pub. This second hypothesis is quite likely that the location data are highly demanded by the followers of marketing and advertising to launch a new application or to launch a number of services related to these. So watch your GPS because they betray you without your knowledge
No comments:
Post a Comment