Yahoo News Hundreds of top apps ‘track your every move and sell your location to advertisers’
Privacy seems to be a thing of the past, as many smartphone apps are tracking people’s movement down to the nearest few feet – and selling people’s location to advertisers.
An investigation found that apps such as the Weather Channel and Weatherbug constantly track users as they go about their daily lives – and the information is sold to other companies.
The data is supposedly ‘anonymised’, but the detail of people’s lives (such as their home addresses and workplaces) could potentially reveal people’s identities, the New York Times reported.
The newspaper gained access to a company which had information on a million smartphones in the New York area.
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It found that around half of smartphones are being ‘tracked’ by advertisers, including devices seemingly owned by children, travelling to school and back home.
The report found that 75 companies harvest this data from apps, and those businesses track up to 200 million devices in the U.S.
The tracking is accurate down to a few feet, and devices update their location thousands of times a day.
