Tracking Devices Watch You

Watch, monitor, follow and spy are all words that mean the same thing to me. The NSA released a guide warning against the security risks that come with not securing your phone, tablet or smartwatches. Many of us have smart devices in every room: watching, listening, waiting. Device location data can be used to compromise staff working in defense or national security. So it goes without saying that location data is pretty valuable. What are you buying?

It can provide details about how many users are in an area as well as a user’s daily routine. Geo-location data can also reveal associations between a user and a place that may have been unknown otherwise. Working in broadcast sales, we know all about Geo-fencing, that's how we know you're in a certain area. For example, during the initial lock downs, our cellular location data was used to determine if we were staying in or venturing out due to quarantine fatigue.This information can be obtained without the consent of the service provider because collecting this information is a part of normal operations.
The NSA guide is called Limiting your Exposure. Limiting, because it’s nearly impossible to stop location tracking altogether. If the device is on, your location can be tracked. Our devices collect this information by design. The article suggests using a secure VPN, resetting your advertising id weekly and disabling find my iPhone to strengthen security.

Everyday users like us don’t want these services turned off because it is inconvenient. We give up so much of our privacy for the sake of convenience. It’s like a bargain; We give our phones everything they need to best serve us. Our location, our names, our face, our schedules, our contacts and correspondence and even our fingerprints are exposed somewhere in the name of ease and convenience.

We may download free apps and hit accept on the terms and conditions, without paying heed to the privacy policy. The mobile advertising industry and app developers abuse this and are under scrutiny. Have you ever mentioned something to someone and suddenly there was an ad for it in your feed? Have you ever swiped your card and suddenly you’re seeing YouTube ads for the item you bought? They say in the future we’ll all have chips implanted in our skin to track us and control our minds. Well the future is now, only instead of a chip in our skin, there is a chip in a device we keep on us at all time…our phones. We willingly walk around with a tracker, a live mic and a camera that knows everything about us. Somebody is always watching you and your kids.