Smartphone Trackers Raise Privacy Worries
By Emily Steel and Justin Scheck
Marketing and software companies are increasingly using sophisticated technologies for smartphones and other mobile gadgets to track consumers and target ads based on their location.
The new commerce using phone users' location to sell ads is raising privacy concerns among U.S. lawmakers and privacy advocates. Recent studies have found that many of the businesses that use location technology don't clearly inform consumers about the kind of data they track, how it is used or with whom it is shared.
Such marketing has spread rapidly in the past year, fueled by the growth of high-speed wireless networks....
Another study this spring at the University of California at Berkeley [by Nick Doty, Deirdre Mulligan, and Erik Wilde of the School of Information] found that most of the mobile-phone applications using a new location program store users' location data indefinitely, but don't disclose what they do with it....