“Verizon in a response to Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey’s call for answers on phone location data said it would start putting a sticker on every phone warning that they tracked location,” Electronista reports.
“The removable screen notice would tell users that it could track the real world location and ‘associate this location data with other customer information,'” Electronista reports. “Subscribers would be asked to check location settings if they’re concerned and to be ‘cautious’ with apps and services.”
Electronista reports, “The labels would come ‘soon,’ Verizon said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Warning: This water is wet.
I wonder what El Jobso has to say about Verizon putting stickers all over his iPhones?
I’m guessing there is a GIANT don’t put stickers on our sh!t claus and Jobs will break his foot off in Verizons A$$.
Given that they record the signal strength of your phone at every cell tower and use it to triangulate your position every cell phone is being tracked.
Exactly. Even your dumb phone is tracked. The only way to avoid it is to turn it off. If you’re really paranoid, remove the battery.
So every phone will have a sticker, thereby negating any “warning” at all. So stupid.
Stickers, really?
How very eighth-grade.
Can i get a gold star sticker instead?
The only sticker Verizon will place is on Android phones with a warning in letters four inches high that says, “Caution: your personal information will be sold to the highest bidder by Google.”
The extent to which Apple, Google and the rest “associate this location data with other customer information” is key, and too unclear. Anonymous location tracking is harmless and useful for many reasons. Tracking “associated with other customer information” is invasive and unnecessary, with the least offensive purpose probably being selling your location to the highest bidder in order to shove more fucking advertising down your throat (and probably charge you for the bandwidth while doing it). Easy opt-out (or better, mandatory opt-in) from such garbage practices is essential, and personally I would be quite happy for the government to ban it completely. And by opt-out, I do not mean a “choice” to “opt out” from useful location services just to stop advertising force-feeding and having one’s location and identity sold to the highest bidder. Hopefully the stickers will make some of these important distinctions, and force more clarity on their policies from Apple, Google and the rest.
Have you read Apple’s statement on the matter by Jobs? It couldn’t be more clear. A sticker stating that phone data may be associated with user data for tracking purposes would be highly inaccurate in the case of Apple phones and Jobs would have every right to go ballistic.
I administer a similar private communications system with one million end points. It uses a database of all transmissions and signal strengths to maintain a routing map for each end point, so that message traffic is routed in an efficient manner instead of broadcasting the the whole system. This saves bandwidth and the time it would take to calculate the best route for each transmission in real time. Apple’s tracking data serves the same purpose. Apple is not tracking you and not selling your data.
apple doesn’t have to worry because they don’t track you.
I wonder how much the “sticker” service will add to your next bill.
Verizon will have to put this on every phone it sells. Mainly due to the FCC requires a history of the phones location for a number of years.
Or is this just knee jerk reaction to keep a lawsuit against Verizon at bay. Maybe Verizon should just include a hint on that sticker for owners of an android phones to contact an attorney if they wish to pursue legal action.
We shall see I guess.
Not gonna happen on the iPhone. For all of the thought and design that goes into the iPhone and it’s presentation when you open the box, with no carrier logo attached? No F’in way that happens.
They MIGHT slap a sticker on the cellophane wrapper that you pay as much attention to as you would a price tag and will be discarded before you ever get your hands on it because of the activation process.
This is one more over reaction to poor reporting and elected officials trying to get their name in the paper.
Remember antenna-gate? Apple had a press conference, danced like a monkey and gave away cases but in regards to the phone changed nothing and the story died.
Tech press is becoming as bad as TMZ.
All Smartphone track location unless you turn the GPS and location services off. Even then im pretty sure they still do.
Privacy is a thing of the past, we got cameras on every street corner and within every store, plus more following around idiots to make reality shows. there is no way around it. people just got to stop worrying about this stuff and enjoy life ^_~