In the latest shoe to drop from Edward Snowden, we find out that the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, have been reaping personal information, including relationship status and sexual preferences, from the data collected by such common smart phone apps as Google Maps and Angry Birds. Additionally, the metadata from photographs is being strip mined by the agencies. Once again, NSA is pinky swearing that they don’t use the data from ordinary Americans unless they’re part of an active investigation, and I imagine that GCHQ is making the same noises through its much abused mouthpiece.
Apart from the “If you’re not going to be using it, why are you collecting and storing it?” question, this brings up the topics of data hygiene and data control.
Data hygiene basically means that you don’t leave your data lying around for others to pick up. Remember, anything you put on the Internet is available to anyone who cares enough to find it. Apparently, the same can be said about electronics such as computers, tablets, and smart phones. If you don’t want others to have and abuse your data, don’t put it out there for them. Why things like whose slot A you want to mate with your tab B are on an easily lost gadget is beyond me. But if you’ve been putting such things on your cell phone, congratulations, now the government knows about it, for whatever reason they can find to justify its collection.
TL;DR – Quit putting things you wouldn’t want anyone and everyone knowing on your cell phone.
Next, we have data control. Do you know what all of those wonderful apps on your iThingie are doing? Is that game reading your address book and sending it to its corporate masters for marketing? Is the mapping software grabbing your location requests and your calendars so that developers can find a way to suggest directions to a meeting before you realize you need them? Did you actually read what you agreed to when you installed and updated it? Someone could probably make a good living out of investigating what the top 1000 apps on iTunes or Google Play are actually doing and comparing that to their stated purpose. It would definitely be a job that lasts a long time.
The exploitation of mapping software is particularly insidious. Look at it this way: Let’s say that an authoritarian administration wanted to know who was attending meetings of an opposition party. They find some low-level fleeb to figure out where the meetings are being held, then mine the data from mapping apps to find out who requested directions to and from those locations for the hour or so before the meeting and the hour or so after. Now you have a pretty accurate list of people who have at least an interest in opposing the government. You’ll notice that I didn’t say a liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, nor did I say Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street in this scenario. Both sides of the political equation can and will abuse access to such data, and doing so will make their efforts to find, fix, and flatten their opposition a lot easier.
It’s time we demand that the government stop gathering this data without a very specific warrant with a heck of a lot of oversight. It’s also time we demand that app vendors stop gathering the data, too, or we should stop using their products.
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