For many apps, granting permission to access your device\u2019s precise location makes sense. Your favorite weather app needs to know where you are to get the day\u2019s forecast, or your go-to fitness app for tracking your running route.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But some apps are also inadvertently sharing their users\u2019 location data with third parties, including advertisers and data brokers, because the app developer may not know that this data-sharing setting is enabled by default.<\/p>\n
New findings by the Electronic Frontier Foundation<\/a> aim to warn app developers that some of the third-party code they place in their apps may also collect their users\u2019 location data when they grant permission to the app.\u00a0<\/p>\n Unless the developer actively switches off the collection, the code snippet (known as software development kits, or SDKs) will inherit the app\u2019s permissions and collect the user\u2019s precise location data.<\/p>\n The EFF says many developers might not realize that they are sharing their users\u2019 location data with third parties by default and urged app makers to disable unnecessary data collection whenever possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n While advertising SDKs are promoted as a way for developers to monetize their app, the trade-off is that the users\u2019 location histories get fed to data brokers, who monetize that information, which then gets sold to militaries, governments, and intelligence agencies, like the FBI<\/a>.\u00a0The data is also a security and privacy risk if it gets hacked or stolen<\/a>, which some data brokers<\/a> have experienced.<\/p>\n Among the Android apps that the EFF identified that were quietly sharing users\u2019 location data included two that had been downloaded a combined 60 million times to date.<\/p>\n The EFF ran its tests by analyzing the apps\u2019 network traffic and seeing which services are receiving the users\u2019 location data.<\/p>\n Bill Budington, a senior staff technologist at the EFF, told TechCrunch that the SDKs they examined account for a small percentage of the broader advertising ecosystem but nevertheless claim to reach billions of users over tens of thousands of apps. That gives some sense of the scale of this type of location data collection.\u00a0<\/p>\n The EFF\u2019s report said that there are \u201cno SDK-specific location permissions,\u201d meaning that once the user allows their location data to be shared with the app, their location data is also shared with advertisers.\u00a0The entities offering those SDKs are generally commercially incentivized to get their customers to collect more data.<\/p>\n \u201cApp-level location permissions alone cannot signal meaningful consent to location collection and sharing by third-party advertising SDKs,\u201d wrote the EFF. \u201cAdvertising SDKs should not make sharing personal data the default, especially for data as sensitive as a person\u2019s location.\u201d<\/p>\n