The Price of Free - Location Tracking

When I started reading the New York times article titled "Your Apps Know Where You Were Last Night", I knew it seemed familiar. This is because I heard about this story while listening to the New York Times daily podcast episode "The Business of Selling Your Location" on my way to school December 10th. I was glad to revisit this article, because I had never truly thought about the implications of turning on your location services on your apps. I was completely unaware of a multi-million dollar industry that costs nothing to us consumers, clicking accept to some fine print on an app's location services contract.

And yes, this might not seem like too much of a concern to the everyday person. But I realized, if it is so easy to track the movements of a man who works for the mayor then practically anyone can be stalked. Hackers could easily find out not only where you live and where you go to school, but the direct route you take everyday.

I would like to learn more about who has access to location buying. I want to know how easy this data is to hack. I also want to learn about the New York Time's process in gathering the data for this article and learning about this industry.

This changes the way I think about apps on my phone. When I think of apps like uber, snapchat, postmates, via and other apps that inherently track your location, I consider their motivations for doing so. Are these apps selling your location for targeted ads? Even google and facebook, websites that claim to be secure, could be using your location for their own purposes and their own targeted ads.

This whole article makes me question the price of free in the society we live in. Even though we may not pay money for an app or a website they can make money from us. They can make money from our personal whereabouts, and constantly keep making more money as long as we have the app. It turns out that many free apps are costly to our personal information.