All you iphone users...heads up!

[terrie]

There was an interesting article in The Washington Post today (May 29, 2019) by Geoffrey Fowler (The Post's tech columnist): It’s the middle of the night. Do you jknow who your iPhone is talking to?"


Here's a little sampling:

"It’s 3 a.m. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?

Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same–and Apple could be doing more to stop it.

On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11:43 p.m., a company called amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3:58 a.m., another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6:25 a.m., a tracker called
Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with. And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address–once every five minutes."




The article goes on to mention Patrick Jackson, a former National Security Agency researcher who is chief technology officer Disconnet with which he developed "Privacy Pro" which identifies and blocks many trackers.

"Jackson’s biggest concern is transparency: If we don’t know where our data is going, how can we ever hope to keep it private? App trackers are like the cookies on websites that slow load times, waste battery life and cause creepy ads to follow you around the Internet. Except in apps, there’s little notice trackers are lurking and you can’t choose a different browser to block them."




There is also an article on "How to limit iPhone app tracking" with step by step info on which settings to check. For example:

"Go to Settings > Privacy–and look all the way at the bottom under the heading “Advertising”. Turning ON “limit ad tracking” won’t stop all this unwanted behavior, but it does put up a speed bump."




Terrie