Smartphone apps track users' locations and sell data to third parties

2025-04-28 01:47:04admin

It's that time of the year again when Americans come together with friends and relatives to share a hearty meal and not think about the world falling apart around them. Or, alternatively, to argue about the different politicians responsible for the crumbling state of our society and planet.

What Thanksgiving revelers might not realize, however, is that the precise geographic details of their communal experience are being recorded, analyzed, and monetized by a combination of smartphone apps and a little known San Francisco-based company by the name of SafeGraph.

And it's super creepy.

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The study, which aimed to quantify just how much "politically divided families shortened Thanksgiving dinners" (reportedly 20 to 30 minutes last year, for what it's worth), is an interesting if somewhat bemusing snapshot of a divided America. But that's not what we're here to talk about. Rather, it's how the study authors went about coming to their eventual conclusion that deserves further consideration.

In order to figure out if Americans were cutting their Turkey Day meals short, researchers first needed to determine just how long individuals spent at holiday dinners both in 2015 and 2016 (you know, for comparison purposes). To do this, they hooked up with SafeGraph — a company that bills itself as "unlocking the world's most powerful data so that machines and humans can answer society's toughest questions" (like the length of Turkey dinners, for example).

It's the next part that will freak you out. Figuring out meal durations comes down to knowing if a person ate at home or a family member's spot, and how long that person stayed at Uncle Billy's before getting fed up with his bullshit and bouncing out. To pull that off, study authors M. Keith Chen and Ryne Rohla needed a lot of location data. Enter SafeGraph.

"The [location tracking] data consist of 'pings', each of which identify the location (latitude and longitude) of a particular smartphone at a moment in time," explains the study. "Safegraph tracks the location of more than 10 million Americans’ smartphones, and our core analysis focusses on the more than 17 trillion pings SafeGraph collected in the continental United States in November of 2016."

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OK, there's a lot to unpack here, so let's take this one step at a time. First, researchers were able to obtain the latitude and longitude of potentially millions of Americans' smartphones via their San Francisco-based friends. Second, there were more than 17 trillionso-called pings made available to them from last November alone. That means this data is being recorded near constantly.

But wait, it gets weirder. Just how, exactly, did SafeGraph get its hands on all this data? A look at the company's privacy policy provides some insight.

"We obtain information from trusted third-party data partners such as mobile application developers, through APIs and other delivery methods," the company notes. "The data collection and use is governed by the privacy policy and legal terms of the data collector and the website using the data; it is not governed by SafeGraph. The information we collect includes data regarding a device’s precise geographic location, as well as other mobile identifiers such as Apple IDFAs and Google Android IDs, and other information about users and their devices."

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In other words, SafeGraph obtains your precise location via the apps on your smartphone. And, with 17 trillion pings from November 2016 alone, the company has a lot of data to work with. So much so, in fact, that researchers can use it to determine how long your Thanksgiving dinner was and whether or not it was at your place or someone else's.

Imagine what other factoids about your daily habits could be gleaned from the same precise location data.

And just what specific apps is SafeGraph getting this info from? We reached out to the company in an attempt to find out, and will update this when and if we hear back.

In the meantime, however, this should serve as a stark reminder that you frequently don't control what smartphone apps do with your data — or who they sell it to — and that if you want to keep the details of your contentious Thanksgiving dinner to yourself, well, maybe considering turning off location services on your cellphone.

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