We have spoken many times before on this forum about personal privacy and data protection. This week I was introduced to a piece of Chinese software, available to the public and easily purchased on the net, which quite took me aback in just how easily my movements over the last three months could identified from my smartphone.
The integration of smartphone user location applications, including GNSS, with messenger apps via Wi-Fi, 3G & 4G is growing at an exponential rate. Many of these applications allow users to share diverse content and information, including photographs, videos, voice messages, location, URL links as well as contact details, and they are no longer just 121 conversations, nearly all these apps include group conversations.
Messenger apps include: Whatsapp, Kik messenger, Viber, Skype, Line, KakaoTalk - some have nearly a 100% uptake in national populations, by example KakaoTalk is used by 93% of smartphone owners in South Korea.
Add to this list social networks, the big ones being: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat. Plus applications for voice and video calls: Skype, Viber and Tango.
There are also geo-aware services that store current locations, and that store geo-tagging information: Foursquare and Facebook and lastly media sharing applications: Snapchat, Vine, and Instagram.
The software developers of many of these applications claim end-to-end encryption, but, when you look inside the database it is not encrypted and historical location information is remarkably easy to find.
However, I use non-of-the-above.
My location information came from my Google account, primarily used for email and as my search engine. The level of detail was remarkable, identifying at times not only which building I had been in, time & date stamped, even which side of the building.
Yet the really clever (
spooky) component of this Chinese software was the way it sued this data was to establish links between users in several devices correlated with location, connecting overall statistics about users’ activity.
Lesson: the only way to truly retain your privacy is by turning off your mobile phone