[advertising]

Friend works for real estate group that provides consulting services for companies looking to move into a new area.

Friend can drag a box around any area down to the block and see how many people visit that area, what part of the city they came from to get there, where they went to next, average income, etc etc etc

We all know we are being tracked but seeing him use his software was still shocking. Apparently all data is from 3rd party apps and they charge $30k++ for their real estate analysis service. Who knows how much they pay for the actual data or how many times over it’s sold. It’s all anonymous but adding just a small bit of information about an individual and pretty easy to figure out and track them even off this anonymized 3rd party data.

Scary hours

[christophilus]

I don’t have many apps. I use my browser for just about everything: weather, search, YouTube, etc.

I’d be really interested to see how much my phone leaks to services like this vs the average phone. I bet it’s still a shockingly large amount.

That said, doesn’t iOS notify you when an app wants to use location services? Did all of these users just opt into that? That seems crazy, if so.

[willstrafach]

> That said, doesn’t iOS notify you when an app wants to use location services? Did all of these users just opt into that? That seems crazy, if so.

Not so crazy.

Local news, weather, and similar apps with a reasonable rationale for Location Services access are often the culprits.

They will put phrases like “See privacy policy.” in the justification text (When asking permission) so they can claim that the user consented.