Hacker News Reader

Comment by zucker42 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know more specifically how a company like Mobilewalla gets location data? Is it from Google, or from apps people open on their phone, or from trackers on websites, or from cell data, or from something else?

Also, is there any way to prevent Google from tracking the location of my Android phone short of uninstalling Android?

View on HN

Cell service companies track your location based on signal strength, and are known for selling this data to as many third parties as possible. There is no way to stop them from tracking your phone location, short of removing your SIM card.

> There is no way to stop them from tracking your phone location

Is airplane mode or turning your phone off effective? I've heard stated before that they are not, but I don't understand the technical details.

"T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data..."

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hu...

It's unlikely this information is coming from Google or Apple directly. There are a ton of ad supported apps out there which collect location data and feed location data (and piles of other metrics) back to the advertising companies who sell the data to data brokers and use it for advertising.

> Also, is there any way to prevent Google from tracking the location of my Android phone short of uninstalling Android?

Good question.

Very often, it’s the phone networks which are selling our location data to these brokers. There is virtually no regulation on this, and for phone companies it’s basically free money.

Does the ethnicity data also come from phone companies?

I hope not, but I expect that with a few days of browsing history it’s trivial to predict ethnicity.

Probably easier to get it via match.com and their subsidiaries.

The data is all over. It goes through brokers and agents and multiple companies that perform various aggregations and shapings... Data Breaches, Crisis and Opportunity (ISBN 978-0-13-450678-4)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/14/how-to-tu...

Basically use somebody else's maps, at the extreme end you can opt out of find my phone, and just don't manually use any Google services at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com