How does Google know that this exact tiny restaurant on the 4th floor of a building full of other restaurants and cafes is “usually busy at 8pm on Wednesday”?
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As others mentioned…location services on phones are aggregated so that these large companies can know where people are and when. It’s not considered private information, because they don’t care that YOU are there. The idea that dozens of phones are at a location at a certain time, regularly, is enough to figure out what is going on.
This can be creepy. I get it. This is the type of stuff that has privacy advocates up in arms. There isn’t necessarily a great answer, because there is value provided in this information. (Traffic jams, rerouting, accidents, etc).
If someone knows that your phone was somewhere, you have to trust that they don’t know it was you, and can’t tie that back to you. And yet, you then have people who want that tied back to them (for example, location tracking apps for runners). You then want to have conditions on who gets to see which type of data…and who you share that information with…and then you have to trust that they all are as ethical as the first company you trusted…and that they’ll never be compromised…which is silly.
The tech industry is in flux on this topic, and there’s no easy answer. A person may not care if their phone is added to a count of other phones at X location at Y time. That’s just +1 on an integer. They may care if that location is a strip club. They may care if someone is able to correlate their data to a specific time, every week, and be able to track your movements to know how often you go to that strip club. The moment you let people see certain data, there is a tremendous amount of data that can be extrapolated, and that can be difficult to control.
In another example, let’s say I give an app permission to track where I travel, but not where I stop. By extrapolation, you could find the places where I’m likely to be visiting. If I give an app permission only to track where I have appointments, but nothing else about me, it is possible to identify that person if given enough data. (Goes to places within X radius, visits this pharmacy, member of this club and this church, etc…look on Facebook and with photo metadata you could find the one person in pictures in that general area)
Again…it is creepy…but Pandoras box has already been opened and the public seems to like the benefit more than the risk…
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