“Different users accept different levels of risk regarding location tracking, but most users have some level of concern,” NSA warns. “Location data can be extremely valuable and must be protected.” The intel agency had personnel compromise in mind when it published its advisory, but the U.S. government’s latest warning has something very different in mind. You need to check your location settings now — getting this wrong could cost you a significant amount of money.
The FTC has found that “companies track consumer behaviors to inform surveillance pricing,” with a particular focus on location and browser tracking. “The Federal Trade Commission’s initial findings from its surveillance pricing market study revealed that details like a person’s precise location or browser history can be frequently used to target individual consumers with different prices for the same goods and services.”
Location sharing hit the headlines this month, when hackers released data stolen from Gravy Analytics, exposing sensitive information on millions of American citizens. NSA’s advice is to check your phone’s app permissions and to “set privacy settings to ensure apps are not using or sharing location data.” If an app needs this data, ensure it’s only available “when using” the app. The agency also tells iPhone and Android users to delete or regularly reset their phone’s advertising ID.
That same advice was issued by security analyst Baptiste Robert following the Gravy Analytics breach. He described the leak was “a national security threat,” with tens of millions of location data points worldwide [covering] sensitive locations like the White House, Kremlin, Vatican, military bases, and more.”
While these are interim findings, they should not be a surprise. The FTC looked into “the middlemen hired by retailers that can algorithmically tweak and target their prices.” In essence, this means instead of a price or promotion being a static feature of a product, the same product could have a different price or promotion based on a variety of inputs… including their behaviors and preferences, the location, time, and channels by which a consumer buys the product.”
Clearly, this isn’t just location data — but that’s a hugely valuable part of it. Again this month, we have seen reports that iPhone users are charged more than Android users for certain products and services. And the FTC found “higher priced products based on consumers’ search and purchase activity. As one hypothetical outlined, a consumer who is profiled as a new parent may intentionally be shown higher priced baby thermometers on the first page of their search results.”
So, three things you can do to make surveillance pricing harder:
- Take NSA’s advice, and disable location sharing on all but critical apps and delete/reset you advertiser ID.
- Use a privacy-centric browser, Safari is better than Chrome on an iPhone and Firefox is better on Android. If you’re using Chrome, consider using incognito mode — albeit that’s not perfect.
- Do not give your data away too readily when asked online, consider using Apple’s Hide My Email and Google’s Shielded Email (when it arrives this year) to protect your real address.
“Once upon a time,” says the FTC, “individual data collection was restrained by the amount of manual effort it required, and a consumer could just throw away a catalog. In this connected ecosystem powered by algorithms and data collection, every click, every mouse move, and every choice made on the way to every purchase is now catalogued.”
We have seen some great privacy innovations in recent years, with more transparency and control before. But it’s not a one-way street. Digital fingerprinting returns next month, courtesy of Google’s recent policy change, and tracking cookies remain a threat. But you have the means to check all this on your phone and you can do something about it.
As NSA says, “while it may not always be possible to completely prevent the exposure of location information, it is possible—through careful configuration and use—to reduce the amount of location data shared. Awareness of the ways in which such information is available is the first step.”
