Today, I want to write about something more serious: Every smartphone and tablet that has GPS and Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android is recording where you’ve been, when you’ve been there and how long you’ve been there. This information is even being saved.
The iPhone always saves these dates for the next 30 days. The feature is called “Recent Places” and these files are saved locally on your iPhone. Now Google is quite a few steps ahead here, they’re saving all of your location data online via the “Google Now” app. Assuming you’ve had a Samsung phone with Android in 2012 and always had your GPS turned on, you can see your complete history here.
However, you can log in on the website linked above and click the cogwheel in the right upper hand corner to turn this service off. For those of you with an iPhone, here’s a guide on how to turn off the localization service.
In my eyes, Google is once again moving on the far border of data protection laws, because your Android phone doesn’t straight tell you that you are being tracked with this service. Of course, your iPhone doesn’t tell you anything about this service either. However Apple doesn’t save the data for a long time. Google’s obsession with saving data seems quite over the top.
My advice would be to turn off this service immediately, regardless if you have an iPhone or an Android phone. Why? Because all kinds of apps from the App-Store also have access to this data and who knows what’s happening next with this personal information.
Information Source: http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2013/10/your-iphone-knows-where-youve-been-puts-it-on-a-map/
Image Source: http://endthelie.com/2012/01/24/big-brother-google-just-got-bigger/
