How Your Smart Phone’s Location Services are Giving You Away

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Don A. Kruse, GoLocalPDX Contributor

Photo credit: "Lust Can't Hide" by Jack Vast, illustration by Bill Edwards

Sharing, and oversharing, is one of the reasons social media is so compelling. People have both the urge to show off, and are compelled to know more than they should about others. It’s a symbiosis.

But we’re sharing more than we’re likely aware of, or comfortable with, when we leave the location feature on our smartphones, tablet or even laptop, turned on.

Say you’re swimming at the club with your kids. Perhaps a well-composed family selfie stamped with “@Multnomah Athletic Club” would let friends nearby know they could join in the fun or come down to the pool and say hello. But maybe your ex-husband doesn’t need to see this, or know that he could accidentally run into you if he were to suddenly get the urge to swim a few laps.

On the other hand, say you’re in the primary stages of contemplating a divorce. It would be wise to disable the location features on your smartphone during your consultation with a family law attorney, unless you wanted anyone receiving a text, email or message from you to know where you were.

Its All About Location

All modern smartphones, tablets and even laptops include geolocation features. They’re built in whether you like them or not. Geolocation is, simply put, the way applications stamp your device's GPS coordinates onto a social media post, a chat message or photo, along with many other tasks you do on your smartphone, tablet or laptop.

That is, unless you take the time to turn this feature off.

The geolocation feature is really handy when you’re looking for a place to eat in a new city, or you’re using your iPhone’s Map to find your way to an elusive, ultra hip gallery opening.

Maybe you’re okay with big brother watching you -- if it means finding four star sushi at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday, most of us are. But the geolocation features work both ways, meaning location services helps you find places and people but it can also help others know where you are or were at any time of the day or night. Are you okay with your boyfriend, girlfriend or ex watching you? That sushi has suddenly become less imperative.

You need to know how to disable this feature so that you can only allow it when you intend to.

Where’s Waldo

In tech circles we call the tracking of a person using their device’s geolocation Where’s Waldo. So how do you prevent your device from announcing where you are all day long? Turning off geolocation for the device will usually disable the feature for any apps that are using it. On an iOS device (iPhone or iPad) go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services and slide it to off. This should disable geolocation for all apps on your device. On an Android device go to Google Settings > Location > and slide it to off.

One catch to disabling the geolocation feature for your device and its apps is that you have now disabled the feature to find your device should it become lost or stolen.

Another method is to go through the list of location enabled apps and disable them individually while leaving the other location features of your device enabled. This means you will need to dig into these settings for each app.

Major Offenders: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook & Messenger

These apps can reveal a lot about you even when you have the location feature turned on. If you use Facebook, you’ll need to learn how to untag yourself when a friend tags you in a post or photo. You can also set up your Facebook account so that when a friend tags you their post won’t show up in your feed until you approve or reject your tags. These settings need to be managed from a computer with a web browser, as they are not available from within the mobile versions of the app.

Messaging apps (Messages, Whisper)

The default settings for both these apps includes a feature to include your location. Make sure it is set to off.

Dating apps (Tinder, OKcupid, Match, Grindr)

Just turn it off unless you really need it to find a date nearby.

Photo/Video apps all use GPS

All photo and video apps have the ability to enable or disable geolocation. Keep in mind that the photos and videos might still have the GPS data included in the EXIF data. See the link below to manage EXIF data.

Instagram

You can enable or disable this on a photo-by-photo basis or disable for all photos. Note that others can tag you in their photos so you can’t completely disable your location from being found in Instagram.

Starbucks

But why do they need to know where I am? So they can sell you more stuff. Turn it off. You’ve already spent too much money on their stuff.

Nerd Stuff

Some apps don’t follow the guidelines laid down by Apple or Google, which means they might be revealing your location even when you have disabled the location features for that app. Grindr is/was notorious for having such a badly coded app that it was easy to track other users of the app even if their location settings were set to off. You can save yourself a lot of grief by learning about geolocation for each of the apps you install on your device. It’s not always obvious that an app wants to report on your location. For example, the blockbuster game Angry Birds used to track your location so advertisers could fine-tune the ads you viewed.

Links

• The basics of privacy on Facebook

• The advanced version of Facebook privacy

• An app that tells you when you’re being tracked

• The California Attorney General warns about location tracking

• The research behind the flaw in the Grindr app

• How to disable Google Maps from tracking you

• EXIF data checking/removal

Don is the Information Technology Director at the law firm of Stahancyk, Kent & Hook in Portland, Oregon. He is a member of the Portland FileMaker Pro User Group, an Apple Developer, and provides expert testimony for clients in Oregon and Southwest Washington. He enjoys social media, photography, providing technical support tips in web forums, talking long walks with his son, and riding his Ducati motorcycle. He can’t wait to share with you some of the new technology the firm is working on.

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