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#locationdata

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Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Your location data isn't just a pin on a map—it's a powerful tool that reveals far more than most people realize. It can expose where you work, where you pray, who you spend time with, and, sometimes dangerously, where you seek healthcare. In today’s world, your most private movements are harvested, aggregated, and sold to anyone with a credit card. For those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, or visiting a protest or a immigration law clinic, this data is a ticking time bomb.

Last year, we sounded the alarm, urging lawmakers to protect individuals from the growing threats of location tracking tools—tools that are increasingly being used to target and criminalize people seeking essential reproductive healthcare.

The good news? Lawmakers in California, Massachusetts, Illinois and elsewhere are stepping up, leading the way to protect privacy and ensure that healthcare access and other exercise of our rights remain safe from invasive surveillance."

eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/priv

Electronic Frontier Foundation · Privacy on the Map: How States Are Fighting Location SurveillanceLocation data is highly sensitive, and without proper protections, it can be used to harm those who are already vulnerable. The digital trail we leave behind can reveal far more than we think, and without laws in place to protect us, we are all at risk.
#USA#Privacy#Surveillance
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Niantic is selling Pokémon Go, Pikmin Bloom, and Monster Hunter Now to Scopely, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian company called Savvy Games, which itself is owned by the Saudi Arabian government’s Public Investment Fund. Scopely, Niantic, and Savvy Games have collectively published six separate blog posts about the $3.85 billion deal, none of which specifically address what is happening with the location data of Pokémon Go’s 100 million players and none of which address how location data collected in the future will be handled under Scopely and its Saudi Arabian owners.

Two other apps, called Campfire and Wayfarer, are also part of the deal. Campfire is a tool that lets people meet up in the real world to play Pokémon Go (or other Niantic games) together, and Wayfarer is an app that specifically leverages the players of Niantic games to map real-world locations for Pokémon Go. Niantic will keep Ingress, its first augmented reality game, and another game called Peridot.

Niantic said that a knock-on effect of this massive deal is that it will be spinning off its nascent AI mapping business, which was using Pokémon Go data to create a “large geospatial model,” into a separate company called Niantic Spatial."

404media.co/saudi-arabia-buys-

404 Media · Saudi Arabia Buys Pokémon Go, and Probably All of Your Location DataA company owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund just bought the most popular AR video game of all time.
#PokemonGo#SaudiArabia#Niantic
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"The Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed settlement agreeing that General Motors and its subsidiary, OnStar, will be banned from selling geolocation and driver behavior data to credit agencies for five years. That’s good news for G.M. owners. Every car owner and driver deserves to be protected.

Last year, a New York Times investigation highlighted how G.M. was sharing information with insurance companies without clear knowledge from the driver. This resulted in people’s insurance premiums increasing, sometimes without them realizing why that was happening. This data sharing problem was common amongst many carmakers, not just G.M., but figuring out what your car was sharing was often a Sisyphean task, somehow managing to be more complicated than trying to learn similar details about apps or websites."

eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/ftcs

Electronic Frontier Foundation · The FTC’s Ban on GM and OnStar Selling Driver Data Is a Good First StepThe Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed settlement agreeing that General Motors and its subsidiary, OnStar, will be banned from selling geolocation and driver behavior data to credit agencies for five years. That’s good news for G.M. owners. Every car owner and driver deserves to be...
#USA#FTC#GM
Public
Maxim Van de Wynckel

Location data of 800.000 Volkswagen cars leaked, 30 million location data points of apps leaked, and 40.000 apps intentionally selling location data, including apps you might use once to track your flight. This is what happened to your location data in the past month.

Location data is valuable, so we need to treat it as such. We are still surveying the perspective of users towards location data:
vub.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/for

(image by Michael Kreil, Flüpke)

visualisation of Volkswagen data breach showing cars in major European cities
#cybersecurity#privacy#locationdata
Public
Mark Wyner Won’t Comply :vm:

So many folks trade their privacy and safety for some minor conveniences.

Other folks know how bad it is, and do what they can to avoid it.

The latter needs to do more to help the former, because we’re all in this together. I’m gonna increase my awareness efforts. Maybe write a couple pieces about some fundamentals.

nbcnews.com/tech/security/loca

NBC News · Location data broker Gravy Analytics was seemingly hacked, experts sayBy Kevin Collier
#Privacy#Safety#OnlineSafety
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Some of the world’s most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement.

The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush and dating apps like Tinder to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystem—not code developed by the app creators themselves—this data collection is likely happening without users’ or even app developers’ knowledge.

“For the first time publicly, we seem to have proof that one of the largest data brokers selling to both commercial and government clients appears to be acquiring their data from the online advertising ‘bid stream,’” rather than code embedded into the apps themselves, Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push and who has followed the location data industry closely, tells 404 Media after reviewing some of the data."

wired.com/story/gravy-location

WIRED · Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your LocationBy Joseph Cox
#USA#DataBrokers#DataBrokerage
Public
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"Hackers claim to have compromised Gravy Analytics, the parent company of Venntel which has sold masses of smartphone location data to the U.S. government. The hackers said they have stolen a massive amount of data, including customer lists, information on the broader industry, and even location data harvested from smartphones which show peoples’ precise movements, and they are threatening to publish the data publicly.

The news is a crystalizing moment for the location data industry. For years, companies have harvested location information from smartphones, either through ordinary apps or the advertising ecosystem, and then built products based on that data or sold it to others. In many cases, those customers include the U.S. government, with arms of the military, DHS, the IRS, and FBI using it for various purposes. But collecting that data presents an attractive target to hackers.

“A location data broker like Gravy Analytics getting hacked is the nightmare scenario all privacy advocates have feared and warned about. The potential harms for individuals is haunting, and if all the bulk location data of Americans ends up being sold on underground markets, this will create countless deanonymization risks and tracking concerns for high risk individuals and organizations,” Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push, and who has followed the location data industry closely, told 404 Media. “This may be the first major breach of a bulk location data provider, but it won't be the last.”"

404media.co/hackers-claim-mass

404 Media · Hackers Claim Massive Breach of Location Data Giant, Threaten to Leak DataGravy Analytics has been one of the most important companies in the location data industry for years, collating smartphone location data from around the world selling some to the U.S. government. Hackers say they stole a mountain of data.
#CyberSecurity#USA#Venntel
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