2020–present
Halfway through the second decade of the smartphone era, it’s now a “Privacy is important” period, as most people are starting to pay far more attention to such concerns than they did before. The change is partially due to the flood of news about privacy violations, starting with reports about unprecedented government access to personal data and moving on to the weaponization of data against individuals.
2020: A Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) sheds light on US government purchases of location data collected from apps for use in Department of Homeland Security immigration enforcement; a later investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union would detail the massive scope of this collection. It’s quickly revealed that other agencies are engaging in similar practices, including the Internal Revenue Service (as reported in The Wall Street Journal), the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. In addition, Vice reports that the US military is purchasing data from a Muslim-prayer app.
2020: Android 11 adds one-time permissions, mic and camera indicators, and, most notably, an auto-reset feature that revokes permissions for apps you haven’t opened in a while. iOS doesn’t offer a similar feature.
2020 and 2021: Apple launches privacy labels and the App Tracking Transparency feature, which shifts to an opt-in model for advertising tracking. These changes seem to have an impact on the ad-tracking industry, and Facebook predicts a $10 billion hit to its 2022 earnings.
2021: A Catholic news outlet obtains location data from the queer-dating app Grindr and uses it to out a priest, forcing him to resign. This is one of the clearest examples we can find of the weaponization of data against a specific person.
2022: Google launches its own privacy labels for Google Play, as well as the ability to block some ad tracking on Android.
2022: The United States Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that previously guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion access; a call on social media to “delete your period-tracking app” quickly follows. Although there is genuine concern surrounding the privacy practices of some of these apps, another major worry mirrors that affecting other apps: They could collect and sell personally identifying location information (including visits to abortion clinics, as The Wall Street Journal reports).
Of course, the past 15 years haven’t been filled with mobile-app controversies exclusively. This decade and a half has seen Facebook gobbling up WhatsApp and Instagram, Google buying Waze, YouTube, and dozens of ad-tech companies, and countless stories of big-tech companies sidestepping privacy rules, cellular carriers repeatedly sharing customer data, and military spyware being installed on thousands of phones. And that’s not even touching on other impactful privacy violations such as the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal or the simple fact that every company appears to be an ad company now.
It’s all, well, a lot.
Credit: Thorin Klosowski for NYTimes/Wirecutter
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/protect-your-privacy-in-mobile-phones/