If you’re particularly worried about revealing your location, the best thing to do is leave your device at home, says Katie Moussouris, founder and CEO of Luta Security. That’s a big reason the EFF says location tracking is the deepest privacy threat from mobile phones. As long as your phone is on, your movements can be tracked via WiFi, Bluetooth, or the signal to your mobile network. (See steps below.) But even if you have location services turned off, mobile apps may be able to glean your general whereabouts through your IP address. It’s becoming harder for companies to get access to your precise location information without your permission, and you can reduce the amount of location data companies collect. "People should at least be aware of how closely they are tracked by hundreds of companies every day, and how that data might end up in the hands of the police." "There’s a doctrine in the law called the ’third-party doctrine,’ which says that if you share data with a company, you lose your privacy rights over it, and the government can generally access it, even without a warrant," says Justin Brookman, director of consumer privacy and technology policy at Consumer Reports.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement or a local police department. Most people know that Google sees their search history, but they have no idea that location data from their weather app could end up with U.S. “It can be used to infer demographics, habits, religious practice, and to reveal when people seek medical care from a place like Planned Parenthood.” “Location data is incredibly revealing of a person’s life,” says Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist at the nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Homeland Security used cell phone location data for immigration and border enforcement. Even your cell phone carrier may be using your location and internet history to target you with ads, if you haven’t opted out of this tracking.Īnd law enforcement officials and government agencies (including the FBI, the IRS, and the Drug Enforcement Administration) have been buying this location data to secretly track citizens, no warrants needed.
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