Smartphone users continually tracked, worries CNIL – The Point

The geolocation of smartphone users is the collected data via mobile devices, but permanent tracking is often not justified by the operation of applications, warn the CNIL and Inria in a study published Monday. Between a quarter and a third of downloaded applications on smartphones running iOS and Android have access to the location of the device, shows the study of the National Information Commission (CNIL) and freedoms conducted with the National Institute for Research in Computer and Control (INRIA).

If this observation is nothing a priori surprising considering the needs of these applications, it calls for “the intensity and the frequency of access to that information” observed in some cases. Thus, the three months it took the test, one of the applications accessed over a million times geolocation. “This represents an average of nearly one access per minute,” note the authors of the study, which have added “struggles to connect this to the functionality of the application.”

data sold to third parties?

“targeting strategies present on the web today contaminate the mobile,” they observe, noting that “permanent access ( geolocation, ed) over a long period seems disproportionate and is a source of risk to geotagged person. ” Questioning the purpose of this intensive tracking, they believe likely that these geolocation data is sold to third parties. After studying what kind of information collecting smartphones Apple iOS operating system in 2013, this second test campaign “Mobilitics” conducted last summer analyzing the mode of operation of smartphones running Android (Google).

This tracking can come from a “bad optimization of application commands.” But it can also result from a desire to “monetize this data for advertising purposes by third parties.” “Although the location data is known has a lot of value for marketing professionals and advertising so we imagine that it participates in the economic model applications,” said Geoffrey Delcroix, Research fellow at the CNIL. “Some free apps will massively shift the location of their users for advertising third party will be able to use it to advertise in another context, in another application or in mobile browsing,” he adds.

The “race to the identifiers”

“It is well understood that this is the most useful data but do not think he has to be treated as a given normal because it is potentially very intrusive “warns Geoffrey Delcroix. Furthermore geolocation, the study also shows that the publishers of operating systems (Google, Apple), and application vendors, are increasingly the “race to the identifiers.” “On iOS as Android, between 50% and 60% of the tested applications accessed identifiers of the phone.” These identifiers are often transmitted to the publisher of the application or to third parties, without the users being aware.

In this context, the CNIL underlines the key role played by Google and Apple in since it is they who set the rules to be observed by the publishers of applications and the management tools available to users. “Some services are installed by default, the user often has no choice but to allow these services to access data,” notes the study.

Among the proposals, the CNIL raises the possibility of creating settings application with a dash explaining their access, data transmission and associated reasons. It also calls to “minimize data collections that are not related to the service provided by the application” and incorporating the issue of data protection from the design of the operating system. More than 30 million French people use daily smartphones and tablets and use an average of thirty applications per device.