The machinery behind how our personal information is moved off our phones is both subtle and highly engineered. Say you are using an ordinary weather app, a torch, or a game. However harmless they look, hidden inside these apps is a particular kind of code known as a software development kit. The main job of this code is to collect your moment-to-moment geographic position, or GPS coordinates, in the background.
Then, the moment you visit any website, a digital auction is held within a few milliseconds to decide which advertisement you will be shown — a process known as real-time bidding. Before your eyes have even settled on the screen, your phone’s identity and location data have reached hundreds of advertising companies behind that auction, and the buying and selling of the information is complete in the blink of an eye.
The obvious question follows: who is actually buying this vast quantity of personal data belonging to hundreds of millions of people, and why? In the digital world they are known as data brokers, whose core business is collecting and selling people’s personal information. They buy location data from hundreds of millions of devices worldwide, build an enormous database from it, and sell it on to various corporate bodies and agencies. The data broker industry is now worth more than a hundred billion dollars, which is why this information is being called the oil of the new age.
Companies often claim that users’ names are stripped from these databases, but cybersecurity experts have demonstrated mathematically that just three or four location points are enough to identify a person precisely — because most people follow roughly the same route to the same workplace every day. So even with a name hidden, tracking a daily movement pattern makes it quite easy to identify anyone.
This unchecked trade in personal information is not confined to ordinary breaches of privacy; it has also become a significant threat to global security. Such misuse of data can create serious risks ranging from the personal level up to national security. It is for this reason that the United States’ Federal Trade Commission has already opened investigations into several data broker firms and imposed various restrictions on them.
Alongside state-level action, however, it is essential that we take immediate steps as users to avoid this digital risk. Rather than granting every app blanket location access, choosing only the “while using the app” option is a sensible decision. Deleting unnecessary free apps from the phone, and turning on the “limit ad tracking” option in the phone’s privacy settings, can also substantially narrow the routes by which data escapes.
In this age of extraordinary technological advance, we cannot deny the conveniences of smartphone use. But allowing our own selves to be turned into a product in exchange is not a reasonable trade either. The most valuable commodity in the digital world is no longer the smartphone in your hand, but you yourself, and every digital footprint you leave behind. The information you leave online is what forms the largest capital base of the big corporate companies.
So the next time an ordinary app asks for your location permission, ask yourself at least once: does this app really have any legitimate need to know where you are? A small amount of awareness on your part is what can protect the immensely valuable privacy of your personal life — because in this world of invisible digital surveillance, the greatest protector of your data is, in the end, you.