Your location can sometimes be tracked through apps—which might have caused you to turn off this particular permission for a bunch of apps on your smartphone. But location tracking goes a lot deeper than that. Here are five ways that apps, companies, and marketers can know where you’ve been, even after you’ve disabled location permissions inside your favourite apps. We can’t tell you exactly how this data is used, but we can give you some ideas about how it’s collected from you.
Logging into websites
Every time you log into Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, or anywhere else, these websites know where you’re browsing from, roughly speaking. In some situations, this is useful—to spot unusual and unauthorized logins, for instance—but it all adds to the data points that these firms have on you and which they might choose to sell on to other interested parties. When you’re online, you’ll be revealing a public IP address tied to your Internet Service Provider (ISP), which is linked to your rough geographic area. On its own, it’s not enough to reveal exactly where you live, but it can be tied to other bits of information to learn more about you. It’s why you’ll sometimes see online ads for your local area even when you’re not logged in anywhere. The only real way around this is to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service, which can connect to the web through a node that’s not at all related to your current location.
Tagging your photos
As you might already know, if you tag a place in an Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, or Twitter photo, that location gets linked to your account and your identity. You should think very carefully about geotagging your pictures, especially if they are being published publicly, and especially if they’re around your home or place of work. Even if you don’t post these images for the world at large to see though, the location data can still be logged and shared with whatever data partners your apps are working with.
Logging into wifi
Public wifi is insecure at the best of times, but you’re also giving away your location whenever you log into a network that’s not your own. We can’t speak for every public wifi operator out there in the world, but we do know that allowing your email address or phone number to be linked to the network might well be one of the conditions of access. Companies don’t often offer wifi out of the goodness of their hearts—they do it to make money from advertisers who want to advertise to you, and to do that they need to know more about where you are.
Posting your fitness data
This one is related to apps, and particularly fitness apps. Now if you want to track your runs around the park, then you’re going to have to give your fitness app of choice access to your location—it’s a trade-off. But beyond that, it’s also worth considering where you’re posting the maps of these runs, whether that’s to other users inside the app on or social networks like Facebook.
Turning on your phone
Even if you switch off location tracking on all your phone apps, your phone itself is still going to grab as much location data as it can from you—it’s just part of the deal of owning a device made by Google or Apple, or indeed any mobile device at all. It’s essential for services like finding your phone when it’s lost or making sure you’re always connected to the nearest cell tower or automatically setting the right time zone.
Unless you want to go back to a dumb phone life, this location data is sort of necessary. To stop your iPhone logging locations full stop, go to Settings then tap Privacy and Location Services, and turn Location Services off. On Android, go to Settings then Security & location, Location, and turn Use location off.
