The Federal Trade Commission is being asked to investigate Apple and Google for engaging in unfair and deceptive practices by allowing the collection and sale of hundreds of millions of mobile phone users' personal data.
They wrote that the FTC should investigate Apple and Google's role in transforming online advertising into an intense system of surveilance that encourages and facilitates the collection and sale of Americans' personal data. The privacy and security dangers involved in using those products have been neglected by these companies. It's past time to end the privacy harms that these companies cause.
Women seeking abortions and other reproductive healthcare will become particularly vulnerable to privacy harms due to the collection and sharing of their location data. It didn't stop.
Data brokers are already selling, licensing, and sharing the location information of people that visit abortion providers to anyone with a credit card. Prosecutors in states where abortion becomes illegal will soon be able to obtain warrants for location information about anyone who has visited an abortion provider. Private actors will also be incentivized by state bounty laws to hunt down women who have obtained or are seeking an abortion by accessing location information through shady data brokers.
A group of senators sent a letter to the FTC's chair. The senators wrote that Apple and Google built advertising-specific tracking IDs into their mobile operating systems.
The letter stated that Apple and Google designed their mobile operating systems to include unique tracking identifiers which they have specifically marketed for advertising purposes. The unregulated data broker market has been fueled by the creation of a single piece of information linked to a device that data brokers and their customers can use to connect to other data about consumers. Consumers' movements and web browsing activity can be included in this data.
AdvertisementThe senators wrote that both companies hurt consumers.
Both Apple and Google now allow consumers to opt out of this tracking. Until recently, however, Apple enabled this tracking ID by default and required consumers to dig through confusing phone settings to turn it off. Google still enables this tracking identifier by default, and until recently did not even provide consumers with an opt-out. By failing to warn consumers about the predictable harms that would result by using their phones with the default settings that these companies chose, Apple and Google enabled governments and private actors to exploit advertising tracking systems for their own surveillance and exposed hundreds of millions of Americans to serious privacy harms.
Warren proposed legislation last week that would make it illegal for data brokers to sell Americans' location and health data.
The letter said that the advertising identifiers can be linked to individual users. Some data broker sell databases that link these advertising identifiers to consumers' names, email addresses, and telephone numbers. It is possible to easily identify a consumer in a dataset of anonymous location records by looking to see where they sleep at night.
If we get a response from Apple and GOOGLE, we will update this story.
According to the company, the ban on companies that sold user data was imposed because they were violating the policies of the play. The advertising ID was created to give users more control and give developers a more private way to make money. The data can't be used for anything other than advertising and user data. There are no claims that advertising ID was used to facilitate data sales.
New, more private advertising solutions that limit sharing of user data with third parties and operate without cross-party identifiers, including advertising IDs, will be enabled by theANDROID PRIVACY STAND Ron Amadeo of Ars called the initiative toothless.
The Supreme Court's abortion decision came out today after a draft was leaked in May. The EFF said it "underscores the importance of fair and meaningful protections for data privacy."
The EFF said that everyone deserves strong controls over the collection and use of information they leave behind as they go about their normal activities. Those seeking, offering, or facilitating abortion access need to assume that their data could be used by law enforcement.
EFF urged state and federal lawmakers to pass meaningful privacy legislation and said companies should protect privacy by allowing anonymous access, stopping behavioral tracking, strengthening data deletion policies, encrypting data in transit, and ensuring that users
More than 40 Democratic members of Congress called on Google to stop collecting and retaining customer location data that could be used to identify women who get abortions. There is no proposal that is close to being passed.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
