We all know that our phones know a lot about us. And they most certainly know a lot about where we go, thanks to the several ways they can track our location.
Location tracking on your phone offers plenty of benefits, such as with apps that can recommend a good restaurant nearby, serve up the weather report for your exact location, or connect you with singles for dating in your area. Yet the apps that use location tracking may do more with your location data than that. They may collect it, and in turn sell it to advertisers and potentially other third parties that have an interest in where you go and what you do.
Likewise, cell phone providers have other means of collecting location information from your phone, which they may use for advertising and other purposes as well.
If that sounds like more than you’re willing to share, know that you can do several things that can limit location tracking on your phone—and thus limit the information that can potentially end up in other people’s hands.
As we look at the ways you can limit location tracking on your phone, it helps to know the basics of how smartphones can track your movements.
For starters, outside of shutting down your phone completely, your phone can be used to determine your location to varying degrees of accuracy depending on the method used:
Now here’s what makes these tracking methods so powerful: in addition to the way they can determine your phone’s location, they’re also quite good at determining your identity too. With it, companies know who you are, where you are, and potentially some idea of what you’re doing there based on your phone’s activity.
Throughout our blogs we refer to someone’s identity as a jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces are larger than others, like your Social Security number or tax ID number being among the biggest because they are so unique. Yet if someone gathers enough of those smaller pieces, they can put those pieces together and identify you.
Things like your phone’s MAC address, ad IDs, IP address, device profile, and other identifiers are examples of those smaller pieces, all of which can get collected. In the hands of the collector, they can potentially create a picture of who you are and where you’ve been.
What happens to your data largely depends on what you’ve agreed to.
In terms of apps, we’ve all seen the lengthy user agreements that we click on during the app installation process. Buried within them are terms put forth by the app developer that cover what data the app collects, how it’s used, and if it may be shared with or sold to third parties. Also, during the installation process, the app may ask for permissions to access certain things on your phone, like photos, your camera, and yes, location services so it can track you. When you click “I Agree,” you indeed agree to all those terms and permissions.
Needless to say, some apps only use and collect the bare minimum of information as part of the agreement. On the other end of the spectrum, some apps will take all they can get and then sell the information they collect to third parties, such as data brokers that build exacting profiles of individuals, their histories, their interests, and their habits.
In turn, those data brokers will sell that information to anyone, which can be used by advertisers along with identity thieves, scammers, and spammers. And as reported in recent years, various law enforcement agencies will purchase that information as well for surveillance purposes.
Further, some apps are malicious from the start. Google Play does its part to keep its virtual shelves free of malware-laden apps with a thorough submission process as reported by Google and through its App Defense Alliance that shares intelligence across a network of partners, of which we’re a proud member. Android users also have the option of running Play Protect to check apps for safety before they’re downloaded. Apple has its own rigorous submission process for weeding out fraud and malicious apps in its store as well.
Yet, bad actors find ways to sneak malware into app stores. Sometimes they upload an app that’s initially clean and then push the malware to users as part of an update. Other times, they’ll embed the malicious code so that it only triggers once it’s run in certain countries. They will also encrypt malicious code in the app that they submit, which can make it difficult for reviewers to sniff out. These apps will often steal data, and are designed to do so, including location information in some cases.
As far as cell phone service providers go, they have legitimate reasons for tracking your phone in the ways mentioned above. One is for providing connectivity to emergency service calls (again, like 911 in the U.S.), yet others are for troubleshooting and to ensure that only legitimate customers are accessing their network. And, depending on the carrier, they may use it for advertising purposes in programs that you may willingly opt into or that you must intentionally opt out of.
We each have our own comfort level when it comes to our privacy. For some, personalized ads have a certain appeal. For others, not so much, not when it involves sharing information about themselves. Yet arguably, some issues of privacy aren’t up for discussion, like ending up with a malicious data-stealing app on your phone.
In all, you can take several steps to limit tracking on your smartphone to various degrees—and boost your privacy to various degrees as a result:
There’s no way around it. Using a smartphone puts you on the map. And to some extent, what you’re doing there as well. Outside of shutting down your phone or popping into Airplane Mode (noting what we said about iPhones and their “Find My Network” functionality above), you have no way of preventing location tracking. You can most certainly limit it.
For yet more ways you can lock down your privacy and your security on your phone, online protection software can help. Our McAfee+ plans protect you against identity theft, online scams, and other mobile threats—including credit card and bank fraud, emerging viruses, malicious texts and QR codes. For anyone who spends a good portion of their day on their phone, this kind of protection can make life far safer given all the things they do and keep on there.
The post How to Limit Location Tracking on Your Phone appeared first on McAfee Blog.
It’s hard to imagine a world without cellphones. Whether it be a smartphone or a flip phone, these devices have truly shaped the late 20th century and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But while users have become accustomed to having almost everything they could ever want at fingertips length, cybercriminals were busy setting up shop. To trick unsuspecting users, cybercriminals have set up crafty mobile threats – some that users may not even be fully aware of. These sneaky cyberthreats include SMSishing, fake networks, malicious apps, and grayware, which have all grown in sophistication over time. This means users need to be equipped with the know-how to navigate the choppy waters that come with these smartphone-related cyberthreats. Let’s get started.
If you use email, then you are probably familiar with what phishing is. And while phishing is commonly executed through email and malicious links, there is a form of phishing that specifically targets mobile devices called SMSishing. This growing threat allows cybercriminals to utilize messaging apps to send unsuspecting users a SMSishing message. These messages serve one purpose – to obtain personal information, such as logins and financial information. With that information, cybercriminals could impersonate the user to access banking records or steal their identity.
While this threat was once a rarity, its the rise in popularity is two-fold. The first aspect is that users have been educated to distrust email messages and the second is the rise in mobile phone usage throughout the world. Although this threat shows no sign of slowing down, there are ways to avoid a cybercriminal’s SMSishing hooks. Get started with these tips:
Public and free Wi-Fi is practically everywhere nowadays, with some destinations even having city-wide Wi-Fi set up. But that Wi-Fi users are connecting their mobile device to may not be the most secure, given cybercriminals can exploit weaknesses in these networks to intercept messages, login credentials, or other personal information. Beyond exploiting weaknesses, some cybercriminals take it a step further and create fake networks with generic names that trick unsuspecting users into connecting their devices. These networks are called “evil-twin” networks. For help in spotting these imposters, there are few tricks the savvy user can deploy to prevent an evil twin network from wreaking havoc on their mobile device:
Fake apps have become a rampant problem for Android and iPhone users alike. This is mainly in part due to malicious apps hiding in plain sight on legitimate sources, such as the Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store. After users download a faulty app, cybercriminals deploy malware that operates in the background of mobile devices which makes it difficult for users to realize anything is wrong. And while users think they’ve just downloaded another run-of-the-mill app, the malware is hard at work obtaining personal data.
In order to keep sensitive information out of the hands of cybercriminals, here are a few things users can look for when they need to determine whether an app is fact or fiction:
With so many types of malware out in the world, it’s hard to keep track of them all. But there is one in particular that mobile device users need to be keenly aware of called grayware. As a coverall term for software or code that sits between normal and malicious, grayware comes in many forms, such as adware, spyware or madware. While adware and spyware can sometimes operate simultaneously on infected computers, madware — or adware on mobile devices — infiltrates smartphones by hiding within rogue apps. Once a mobile device is infected with madware from a malicious app, ads can infiltrate almost every aspect on a user’s phone. Madware isn’t just annoying; it also is a security and privacy risk, as some threats will try to obtain users’ data. To avoid the annoyance, as well as the cybersecurity risks of grayware, users can prepare their devices with these cautionary steps:
The post Cybercrime’s Most Wanted: Four Mobile Threats that Might Surprise You appeared first on McAfee Blog.