Anyone who works at the company who makes an app, any of the third parties an app sends data to, or even employees at the company hosting the server that stores the data can possibly access some or all of the data you give them. Determining who those parties are, unfortunately, isn’t straightforward. This data can be bought and sold for advertising purposes, or purchased by agencies of the US government.Īlthough it’s easy to fixate on the creepiness of the ad industry, it’s also useful to remember that there are potentially greater risks to your data and privacy depending on who can see your data. But because the developer hasn’t investigated the privacy practices of those ad networks, those SDKs could take all the data that passes through them when you use the app, package that data up, and then sell it these entities could continue to pass your data along, combining it with data from other companies until it forms a clear picture of your behavior. Whitney Merrill, a privacy attorney and data-protection officer, told us that what scares her most “are the SDKs and random packages that people are throwing in that still collect data in ways that weren’t anticipated.” Merrill described a hypothetical-though not unlikely-scenario in which an app developer monetizes its app by putting in a bunch of different advertising SDKs to leverage as many networks as possible. These ad companies want as many apps as possible to include their SDK so that they can collect more data to build better profiles. Unless you read the details of a privacy policy or bother to scroll through the pages of a terms-of-service statement, you get neither an indication that this data gathering is happening nor details as to what data is being sent to third parties, but that transmitted data contributes to a profile of you that advertisers then use to target ads. With mobile apps, advertising tends to work like this: An app developer includes a bit of code from a software development kit (SDK), made by an advertising network you’ve likely never heard of, that can gather all sorts of information, such as your location and app-usage data. Where your data goes (and who can see it) What phone owners have instead are sometimes-complicated menus full of permissions that are buried deep within an operating system and rarely set up by default with their privacy in mind. It also means that the industry has no standards to follow, so it’s difficult for everyone to figure out what is and isn’t possible on any given device. In the absence of a federal privacy law, most ad-tech companies and data brokers are unregulated and opaque in their operation, which makes it nearly impossible for phone owners to track where their data goes or how it gets used, let alone prevent that data from being shared in the first place. “Today the ad tech world would have been unrecognizable from back when the iPhone was first introduced.” “I think the transition to mobile devices brought a sea change in data collection, because unlike traditional ad tech, which was mainly focused on what we were searching for, now companies could also focus increasingly on where we were,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told us. But digging through history to understand where the privacy controls of iOS and Android began, and how both mobile operating systems have shifted to give people more control, can give you a better idea of what the true threats are right now. Since 2007, app-privacy controversies-ranging from the social network Path downloading the contents of people’s address books to every weather app under the sun selling location data-have snowballed, leading to concerns both legitimate and misinformed, as well as the inability of many phone owners to determine which threats are real. In the 15 years since the iPhone’s debut, the world of data privacy has changed significantly.
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