Did you know that your smartphone is taking in your information at least 100 times a day? According to Sileo, a group that is dedicated to the education and prevention of identity theft and data breaching, companies like Apple and Google are constantly aware of your whereabouts and are storing them into a giant database. I find this to be a little disturbing since these are companies that are designing the software and hardware not phone carriers.
One thing that many may not be aware of is that these companies are actually allowed to do this because each user hits “Agree” to the terms and conditions without actually reading all of it. This is scary because a lot of the products and software that I use have these terms and agreements and the chances of me reading through all of them are very slim.
The Sileo Group is advising the community to put pressure on these companies to stop collecting our data and to discontinue the location-based tracking. Although it may be helping these companies with marketing and trends, it is putting the future of tech privacy at stake.
Read the article here.
UPDATE: After looking online about this data collecting in relation to the iPhone, you are able to turn this function off. If you go into Settings->About->Diagnostics and Usage, you can choose don’t send which will not automatically transfer your data to Apple. As for the geotracking, you can manage your location services and which applications are using it.