Having done some work in this space I can tell you the exact process. Applications on your phone provide a maid. Mobile Application ID. Which reports back it's(the phones) geo location. Using some basic statistics regarding location, duration of stay, time of day, you infer home address, work address. Once you have a small foothold you go to aggregated data repositories and run a query. Once you get a positive hit the rest is dead simple.
I had been paranoid about this for some time, thanks for confirming.
It is so trivially easy to decipher a person's life from their location data, especially with some simple ML.
The fact that it's so easy ensures in my mind that it's only a matter of time before this data falls into the hands of a true authoritarian administration.
Basically, cell service providers collect as much data as possible and share it with as many third parties as possible. They keep track of your internet traffic, and they can keep track of your location based upon signal strength.
This is just one of the sources they get their data from, but there’s no way to stop it, short of removing your SIM card.
An easy one is to provide a mobile hotspot with the name `attwifi` with no password and just sniff the data. You can derive a lot of data just from the network activity on a phone and since you're on WiFi, you can get approximate WiFi location. A couple of dozen laptops in a couple of buildings and you can also approximate the direction the phones moved as they go from device to device.
That's why it is extremely important to run apps like NoRootFirewall and block all the apps from being able to access internet while they are not in use.
I do not know it/of it so I cannot really say. If it works along the lines of NoRootFirewall ( creates a firewall to localhost and forces all internet connectivity to to go through that tunnel with a per app/per host allow/deny policies that are easy for a user to enale/disable ) then it is strictly the question of UX/design decisions.
FFS, my camera application wants to talk to the internet, sometimes when I'm NOT using it!
I disagree. It's an effective way of conveying emotion and in so breathes "life" to the words. It's a gentle reminder that the person typing these things is human; bringing along a range of complicated life experiences and emotions that you may be unaware of. Perhaps you need to look inwards and discover why something that is ordinarily insignificant brings you so much frustration. Is it from a preconceived idea that swearing implies a lack of intelligence? Time for some introspection.
