Tracking the Trackers: Where Everybody Knows Your Username. Click the local Home Depot ad and your email address gets handed to a dozen companies monitoring you.
Your web browsing, past, present, and future, is now associated with your identity. Swap photos with friends on Photobucket and clue a couple dozen more into your username. Keep tabs on your favorite teams with Bleacher Report and you pass your full name to a dozen again. This isn't a 1984-esque scaremongering hypothetical. This is what's happening today. [Update 10/11: Since several readers have asked – this study was funded exclusively by Stanford University and research grants to the Stanford Security Lab. Background on Third-Party Web Tracking and Anonymity In a post on the Stanford CIS blog two months ago, Arvind Narayanan explained how third-party web tracking is not at all anonymous. In the language of computer science, clickstreams – browsing histories that companies collect – are not anonymous at all; rather, they are pseudonymous. A third party is also a first party, e.g. Google to build profiles of Gmail users for advertisers.
Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves. Update, 4/27/11 — Apple has posted a response to questions raised in this report and others.
By Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden Today at Where 2.0 Pete Warden and I will announce the discovery that your iPhone, and your 3G iPad, is regularly recording the position of your device into a hidden file. Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps. We’re not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it’s clearly intentional, as the database is being restored across backups, and even device migrations. A visualization of iPhone location data. The presence of this data on your iPhone, your iPad, and your backups has security and privacy implications. What makes this issue worse is that the file is unencrypted and unprotected, and it’s on any machine you’ve synched with your iOS device. In the following video, we discuss how the file was discovered and take a look at the data contained in the file.
What information is being recorded? Don’t panic. Who Else Is Tracking Your Location? Apple has been in hot water for the past week or so after it was discovered that iOS devices are tracking users as they move about, and storing location data.
While having your iPhone or Android smartphone keep tabs on where you go raises privacy concerns for some, smartphones are by no means the only thing monitoring where you've been. Wireless Providers While Apple and Google are getting a lot of attention over what location tracking information they do, or do not log, there is little attention being paid to the fact that the wireless providers log and store the same information. Wireless providers may not be able to pinpoint your location down to a few meters like GPS can, but the wireless cell towers keep tabs on which tower your mobile phone is connected to as you travel about.
So, wireless providers can at least connect the dots to figure out where you've been on a larger scale. GPS Navigation ATM / Credit Cards Customer Loyalty Programs ISPs and Web Sites Vehicle RFID.