Location services, Google is tracking your every move you make
Location services are considered a serious threat to privacy because data managed by company like Google could be used for online surveillance.
Many experts consider
privacy a utopia, every activity we make online is constantly tracked and in many cases principal service providers manage much more information than needed. Google company has been
accused many times to provide support to the US Government for online
surveillance.
A few days ago the
business magnate Rupert Murdoch described the activity of Google company more aggressive and invasive of the operations conducted by the
NSA:
“NSA privacy invasion bad, but nothing compared to Google.” said Rupert Murdoch.
Google provides a huge number of services that we daily uses, the majority of
mobile users has in his pocket an
Android device that manages an impressive amount of user’s data including our calls and our movements.
Thanks to mobile device we carry on devices equipped with sophisticated sensors that could be abused invade our privacy.
Google acquires any data related to our position, it knows every step we make and can keep track of the history of our movements.
“You can yourself check your every move from here. You just need to log in with the same account you use on your Smartphone, that’s it. The map will display all the records of everywhere you‘ve been for the last day to month on your screen,” Elizabeth Flux wrote on Junkee.com reports.
Tracking of the User’s location is one of the most debated privacy issues, accessing to an online address is possible to see your movements in any period and it’s not a movie.
The idea that someone could now in every instant of the day where we are is disturbing, even if it is a service provider.
Of course, this is possible only if users have enabled ‘location services’ in their mobile devices, but the problem is that there is a lack of knowledge within ordinary users.
There is another worrying issue to consider, even if users switch off the location services, they can be switched back on is an app installed by the user access to the
GPS location … and once again people ignore it or forget it for various reasons.
Stay hidden is quite impossible, it happened also to me, that I finished my+
holidays today, despite I usually disable the location services I probably have used a mobile app that turned on them again, and this is the result.
Just clicking on
this link I have noticed that my position was tracked by Google during my movements
… and now you
now where I spent my summer holidays.
It’s not the first time that services offered by the Google company are the subject of heated discussions, in 2009 experts the Google “Latitude” system, it was a location-aware feature of Google Maps which allowed a mobile phone user to share trusted people to share its current location.
Google officially tracks for users to customize advertisements, but security and privacy experts remarked that the data collected could be used for
surveillance by governments and bad actors.
Users’ data are daily managed by different companies that monitor our
habits, mainly for commercial purposes and to optimize the offers, but the data collected are often managed
ignoring security
best practices, and in the majority of cases it’s quite impossible for the users to understand who is collecting their data and why.
To preserve your privacy disable the location service and consider carefully which apps request the access to location data
and which permissions they need … in today society privacy is
greatest value we have.
Pierluigi Paganini
August 24, 2014
