Personal Data For Sale: Location Tracking

Data Collection as a Business

Have you every wondered why so many web applications seem completely free to use on the web? Why you are prompted to accept or decline cookies when you visit a website? Or why apps and services sometimes ask for permissions? The answer is the same: your personal data is worth money. That free web application may be monitoring all your activity on the site and discreetly collecting as much information about you as possible. Cookies can be used to identify specific devices and potentially track it for years. Permissions let apps and services collect information about you and you're device, like all your contacts, what files you have, what phone calls and texts you make and send, device information, health data, and so much more. All this collected information is sent to information brokers, advertising companies, or big corporations with the goal of harvesting the data for business insights and advertising campaigns. 

Location Data

One of the biggest offenders is location data. Many apps claim they need your location to function, and this is true for some of them. How is you map app supposed to be anything more than a reference source if it doesn't know where you are? The issue arises when your location data is collected for reasons other than to provide you service. That same map app could be constantly monitoring you location, all the time, maybe even when the app in closed and sending everything it records to a third-party with the intention to sell the data or the access to it. Now you have an unknown number of companies with a precise record of where you've been, currently are, and the patterns that predict where you will be. Apps that have no business accessing your location could be doing the same thing. If an app asks for something along the lines of location permissions, say no unless it requires the permission to function (Fussell, 2022). 

Everyone is a Valuable Data Source

You might be thinking that this is something you don't need to worry about, you have nothing to hide. The truth is, everybody does in today's world. What about those security questions you filled out when making an important account, the ones with your elementary school, first pet, maiden name? The password you made for your work computer containing sensitive files. Does it include information tied to you, your life, your friends, or your location? If it does, the information from you personal life that may seem utterly innocuous suddenly became much more valuable. Some information can be embarrassing or potentially ruin chances of employment if it's revealed. People can impersonate you online, maybe even in real life, with this harvested information if they get their hands on it. Yes, the companies that collect the data are legally obligated to protect it somehow, but that's not fail proof. At all. 

Data Breaches

Data breaches, the leakage of data held by a company as a result of accidental or malicious exposure, happen by the thousands every year, with potentially millions of people effected. In 2024 alone, over a billion records were leaked from data breaches. The 2024 AT&T data breaches (there were two), led to the theft of phone numbers and call records of nearly 110 million people (almost all of the company's customers), from six months in 2022. Who placed calls, to whom, when, and sometimes where, names, addresses, became public record for 73 million people earlier that year when some of the records were published online (Whittaker, 2024). 

In other words, do not provide data breaches with ammunition. If you can limit some of the data collected by these companies by simply being conscientious of what you agree to, then you've made your online presence a bit more subdued and generally safer. 

Blender

Moving on, this week I tried out Blender, an open source and free 3D animation, rendering, compositing, and video editing software. My initial impressions are mixed. I loved all the powerful tools and features. The 3D rendering was extremely advanced, even with a simple JPG image file. All the detail was interesting, but it was so complicated. I personally do not possess any experience with this type of software, so the learning curve was steep. It took reading online guides, experimenting, and eventually following a tutorial: here, but I finally made an animation that I can be proud of. The animation is of falling snow: Blender Animation. Unlike in the guide, I used a 3D render in the background and changed up my snowballs so they would be a bit bigger and differently shaped. My snow speed and rotation rate are also different.

Based on my experience, I would not recommend Blender to people who just want simple animations. It's too time consuming to learn, and most people don't need anything this complicated. For professionals however, especially people just starting out in the animation field, I think this is great software. While not the highest tier out there, Blender is still incredibly powerful and relevant in the animation industry.

Conclusion

Data privacy is something everyone needs to be aware of and working towards, because there are few unaffected, and the consequences of leaked data can be drastic for the company and the individual. Simply limiting the software you use to ones you've read the privacy policies for and denying all cookies and permissions when possible can limit what data is captured about you.

References

Fussell, S. (2022, September 1). The Most Important Things to Know About Apps That Track Your Location. Time; TIME. https://time.com/6209991/apps-collecting-personal-data/

Whittaker, Z. (2024, October 14). The biggest data breaches in 2024: 1 billion stolen records and rising | TechCrunch. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/14/2024-in-data-breaches-1-billion-stolen-records-and-rising/