Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location
Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location
A hack of location data company Gravy Analytics has revealed which apps are—knowingly or not—being used to collect your information behind the scenes.
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Crazy. These are the apps that bundle location and network scraping libraries. Those libraries not only gather location data (GPS or network based) but also spy on your surrounding wifis, bluetooth beacons and cell towers.
This allows the distributors to build huge databases that allow to locate things without GPS, just cell networks.
This is actually really useful and I encourage people to help improve this. Use NeoStumbler and collect such data. It is all opensource and will be processed to not allow such tracking. But it will allow geolocation privately, for everyone.
Ironically people are already doing this all the time, and not privately at all.
Is there something like NeoStumbler for iOS?
I mean there is no way to use the database on iOS
But no, afaik there is also no Stumbler. Apps need quite some extended privileges to work well, might be restricted
- record network data
- record location in background
- read all available networks
Well... apple itself does this (and btw apples location data is actively scraped. Really poorly protected) but no other app can do it likely