Abstract
Mobile devices and various applications have become an increasingly essential aspect of daily user activity. A key element common for mobile applications available on the market is that they use geolocation. This functionality supports desirable actions to be performed in respect of personalized user expectations. Although the functionality provides a number of benefits, it may also be a source of potential risks to its users. Not only does it expose their views but it may also limit their civil liberties. The article discusses issues related to the access to private data through geolocation services on mobile devices. It focuses on quantitative and qualitative research involving a sample of two hundred most popular free applications in Poland. Research questions aim to obtain information about the nature and the percentage of applications that require access to dubious or special permissions, implemented tracking codes, or trackers, as well as to verify the correlation between tracking codes embedded in applications and requests for access permission. The explanation of technological conditions and processes conducive to aggregate seemingly inaccessible data and possibilities of their use was essential to the success of the research.
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Notes
- 1.
Following Dominik Karbowski’s definition, geotrapping is a method of “identifying smartphone and tablet users staying in a specific place at a given time. It enables the targeting of an advertising campaign based on the user’s historical location data and targeting them with advertisements also long after leaving the location” (Nowy Marketing, 2017).
- 2.
Exodus Privacy is a French non-profit organization run by activists working to protect privacy in the virtual space. So far, as part of their activities, they have issued 120,000 reports for over 68,000 mobile applications available in the Google Play store. In over 41,000 of them, they identified the tracking codes of advertising ID aggregators (Exodus Privacy, 2020).
- 3.
Whenever the following phrases appear in the paper: elevated privileges, privileged privileges, dangerous privileges, they refer to privileges that, following Android developers, were categorized as privileges that were assigned the rank of “dangerous”.
- 4.
Out of 89 applications requesting more than five elevated privileges and at the same time access to a location (exact or approximate), five of them required access to an approximate location only (these were: Booking, FatSecret, Reddit, Smule, Zara).
- 5.
Out of 39 applications requesting less than six elevated privileges and at the same time access to a location (exact or approximate), four required access only to an approximate location (these were: Allegro, ASOS, Dublicat, Ewa: learn English).
- 6.
Sample of 200 applications, minimum amount equal to 0, maximum 47, and σ is 7.88.
- 7.
Sample of 128 applications, minimum amount equal to 0, maximum 44, and σ is 7.84.
- 8.
SDK—(Software Development Kit) a software library that connects an application to a certain network of online services. This library can perform various functions, for example retrieve the current weather for a specific location. It is also supposed to collect data about the device and transfer it to its own servers—for example by sending weather inquiries for the device’s location.
- 9.
- 10.
A beacon in wireless technology is the concept of broadcasting small pieces of information. The information may be anything, ranging from ambient data (temperature, air pressure, humidity, and so forth) to micro-location data (asset tracking, retail, and so forth) or orientation data (acceleration, rotation, and so forth) (Lindh, 2016, p. 2).
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Jabłońska, M., Jabłoński, P. (2021). Mobile Devices: A Public Source of Private Data. In: Musiał-Karg, M., Luengo, Ó.G. (eds) Digitalization of Democratic Processes in Europe. Studies in Digital Politics and Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71815-2_11
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