Controlling the location trackers

Current statistics suggest that well over 6.6 billion of us have a smartphone, that’s almost 84 per cent of the world’s population. Many users are well aware of the privacy concerns surrounding the apps on their smartphone and choose to ignore those for the great benefits they perceive in using those apps on a daily basis. Legitimate companies generally alert their users to what might happen to their data when they install and use their apps.

Unfortunately, not all developers are as upfront. Many smartphone apps hook into all sorts of personal and private data on your phone and exploit this in marketing and the accrual of that targeted data for other purposes. Many apps share this with third parties for many different purposes. Given that electronic governance, e-governance is on the rise, there may well be risks to our personal data in terms of political intervention and control particularly in what we might refer to as rogue states. Of course, that phrase might apply to any country in the world to different degrees.

Research in the International Journal of Electronic Governance, has investigated the integrity of smartphone apps running on the Android mobile operating system that has access to the location data on your device, such as mapping tools and fitness trackers. The Android operating system represents the major share of the operating system market with almost 3 million apps available to it. Many people use such location-enabled apps – on a daily basis. The tools work only if location services are enabled and permitted on the device.

Stylianos Monogios, Kyriakos Magos, and Konstantinos Limniotis of the Open University of Cyprus in Nicosia, Nicholas Kolokotronis of the University of Peloponnese in Tripolis, Greece, and Stavros Shiaeles of the University of Portsmouth, UK, have looked at a range of apps that use smartphone location services and the GPS (global positioning system) on such devices to reveal what personal data these popular apps have access to on a smartphone.

Fundamentally, the researchers found that too many apps do not fully disclose what personal data they collect from a smartphone, what purpose it is collected, or with whom it is shared. Many of those apps process personal data in ways that are undoubtedly in breach of many different data protection rules and regulations in many different parts of the world. In addition, most of these apps are linked to advertising tracking services and it is likely that every smartphone user with such apps installed is being tracked and profiled on a massive scale entirely unbeknown to them. There may also be other privacy concerns and issues that remain hidden.

The team suggests that app developers must be forced to be fully transparent. Moreover, users must be allowed full control over their data so that they can use chosen apps without compromising their privacy so that data not needed by a given app cannot be accessed by the app, for instance. A new privacy model is needed for the app ecosystem, the researchers add. The regulators that purportedly oversee the use of our personal data in all kinds of areas should have full governance over the app developers so that such suggestions might be implemented and users are given the opportunity to take back control of their personal and private data.

Monogios, S., Magos, K., Limniotis, K., Kolokotronis, N. and Shiaeles, S. (2022) ‘Privacy issues in Android applications: the cases of GPS navigators and fitness trackers’, Int. J. Electronic Governance, Vol. 14, Nos. 1/2, pp.83–111.