You’re location-tracked!

Besides, you are probably already exposed anyway, if you use a smartphone that is powered by Google’s Android operating system (OS) or if you have an iPhone, which is manufactured by Apple, Inc. (The OS, or engine, behind the iPhone is called iOS.) For example, if you own a Galaxy smartphone, chances are that it […]

Besides, you are probably already exposed anyway, if you use a smartphone that is powered by Google’s Android operating system (OS) or if you have an iPhone, which is manufactured by Apple, Inc. (The OS, or engine, behind the iPhone is called iOS.) For example, if you own a Galaxy smartphone, chances are that it is powered by Android, at least before Samsung rolls out its own operating system dubbed Tizen. Thus, Google and Apple know your location at any point in time, if you use smartphones powered by their OS’s. However, it is not clear what Google and Apple do with the information.  But we do know what other companies are doing with similar information that they obtain about you via your Wi-Fi system.
Here are some of the bits of information about you that can be gleaned when you are tracked because your Wi-Fi is turned on: Where you go for your gym and jogging and how often you go, the neighborhood you live in, your general lifestyle categories, your age group, and the doctors you visit and hence some information on your health status or the kinds of diseases that you may have. Trackers can even tell whether or not you are a youth by examining the signals from your phone that are coming from schools during school hours. The places where your phone spends time (“rests”) are also standard bits of information that folks can use to find out your office and home address. Potentially more insidious tracked data includes the people you talk to, the people that talk to you, your various business interactions, your place of work, the church or mosque that you worship in and the time and frequency with which you worship, or what you do with yourself in general.
Ordinarily the data collected on you via phone-tracking does not include your biographical information or information about your family or social circle. This is the area where you actually help trackers – when you log into social media such as Facebook via free Wi-Fi services at public places (restaurants, hotels, coffee shops, etc.) With this, trackers can collect your names, ages, gender, and other bits of information available in your Facebook.   
You might be wondering whether or not location-tracking is legal or constitutes an invasion of privacy. I am not quite sure there are laws forbidding location-tracking, but I think Canada requires the consent of the consumer before his or her profile can be used. The activity sounds like something European countries would like to monitor, although I am not aware of firm laws. Currently, the U.S. does not appear to have any laws either, and it seems companies do not have to obtain your consent before collecting and sharing your personal information and information about your location.
Some companies are exploiting the lack of strict regulations to profit from location-tracking. This is how it works: You naively or innocently log in to a Wi-Fi at a café – an action that automatically allows anyone to track your movements even after you have left the café, and generate folder or dossier about you, which can be marketed to other businesses. Elizabeth Dwoskin in the 14 January 2014 issue of Wall Street Journal talks of the Toronto, Canada-based company Turnstyle Solutions, Inc., which she says is at the forefront of the location-tracking business. Turnstyle tracks consumers who are continuously broadcasting their location from phones. Turnstyle, which is barely a year old, “placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto, to track shoppers as they move in the city.” She continued, “The sensors, the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones.” That allows them to create portraits of roughly 2 million people’s habits as they have gone about their daily lives, travelling from yoga studios to restaurants, to coffee shops, sports stadiums, hotels, and nightclubs.” Dwoskin also talks about Viasense, Inc., another Toronto startup company that is “building detailed dossiers of people’s life-styles by merging location data with those from other sources, including marketing firms.” According to Dwoskin, Viasense follows between 3 million and 6 million devices each day in a 400-kilometer radius surrounding Toronto. The company is said to buy bulk phone signal data from Canada’s national cellphone carriers. Viasense’s own computer program then “breaks those users into lifestyle categories based on their daily travels, which it (Viasense) says it can track down to the square meter.”
So, what is a consumer to do? For more sophisticated users, note that your phone’s MAC address and IMEI number are unique to your phone, and are what anyone really needs in order to identify you. For the rest of us, you can try to shield yourself from unwarranted snooping by always turning off your Wi-Fi or even your phone when you are not using it. You can also decide to go basic – those no-frills, cheap, voice-only phones, that don’t know what Wi-Fi is. Another piece of advice is to truly convince yourself of the value you get from social media such as Facebook, in case you can safely not use, or login, with Facebook.
The bottom line in this article is that businesses can and do exploit the capabilities in your phone to determine your location and life style.