Say goodbye to your privacy, your smartphone is stalking you!
Throughout these past few decades, technology has been advancing at a rapid pace right before our own eyes! It truly is a blessing and a curse. The growth of technology has made our lives so much easier, whether that is by ordering food or clothes online, to using Uber to get us from point A to B.
How is it a blessing? — it has made everything more convenient for us. Forgot your card at home? No problem, just use Apple Pay. Don’t have a ride home from work? No problem, just use Uber or Lyft to get you home. Haven’t seen your cousins from Europe in a long time? Just FaceTime them!
We can have everything we need right at our fingertips due to these technological advancements. However, that does not necessarily mean that can always be a good thing…
How is it a curse? — we are selling our privacy without even knowing it. What we don’t realize is that our smartphones are constantly tracking every move we make, whether we like it or not. They know our every move!
I have found myself realizing that my phone knew my every move when I would get in the car and it would automatically alert me how long it would take to get there without me even turning on my navigation… what freaked me out was that it knew I was going to work in the first place! Then it began doing that every time I was on my way to work because my phone picked up on my daily time patterns of when I would leave to go there.
The growth of social media hasn’t helped with the stalking of our smartphones either. These days, if you want to take a Snapchat, you cannot use the filters without turning your location services on for it to work properly. With Instagram, if you want to tag a location on your posts, it will already know where you are and make it an easy click for you.
In this article, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html , it explains that Lisa Magrin, a 46-year-old math teacher’s whereabouts were being recorded every two seconds… without her knowledge. Although the companies state that they did not have any of her personal information like her name, they knew where she traveled to work and whenever she would stay over her ex-boyfriends house overnight. She later went on to say “It’s the thought of people finding out those intimate details that you don’t want people to know.”
One of the main problems with these apps — they tell you to allow location services in order for the app to function properly for you, but what they fail to explain is that they are selling your information to companies for them to make advertisements and marketing strategies for consumers. Meaning, that is being done without or awareness or even permission.
So where does this take us to next? — Not quite sure but it definitely is scary to think about. It is tough knowing that we are constantly being watched, but this is the price we have to pay if we continue to use these smartphones.
