Posted on 01/09/2019 4:40:00 AM PST by george76
The Los Angeles city attorney’s office announced Friday that it has sued the parent company of the Weather Channel, alleging that for years it has misleadingly and unlawfully collected and sold the private data of its mobile app users.
In its lawsuit against Time Warner Cable, filed in L.A. County Superior Court, the city attorney’s office claims that the company tracks the exact location of its Weather Channel app users, and then sells that private information to advertisers without its users’ knowledge.
“For years, TWC has deceptively used its Weather Channel App to amass its users’ private, personal geolocation data — tracking minute details about its users’ locations throughout the day and night, all the while leading users to believe that their data will only be used to provide them with ‘personalized local weather data, alerts and forecasts,’” the complaint reads.
The data serves no weather-related purpose, but was only collected in order to allow TWC to turn a profit, the complaint reads. The data was sold to at least 12 third party websites over the past 19 months.
The Weather Channel app has about 45 million users, according to the complaint.
TWC intentionally obscures this information” in a 10,000-word privacy policy “because it recognizes that many users would not permit the Weather Channel App to track their geolocation if they knew the true uses of that data,”
...
”We allege TWC elevates corporate profits over users’ privacy, misleading them into allowing their movements to be tracked, 24/7,” City Attorney Mike Feuer said. “We’re acting to stop this alleged deceit.”
(Excerpt) Read more at losangeles.cbslocal.com ...
Sounds like a good idea for a lawsuit against FB and Twitter. Of course, their CEO’s hold the correct politics.
Sounds like the tip of the iceberg. But yes, if you have a phone, you are almost certainly being tracked by NSA and others. Does NSA give a damn about you enough to care that you went out and bought milk this morning? Of course not. Will they care about you when it’s time to round up guns? You better believe it.
I eat at McDonalds, shop at Walmart , watch Fox News and hang out at Free Republic. I support the President of the United States and his Rpublican allies in the Congress
Yep... All carriers do this, they just haven’t got caught yet. Any app that requires location access permission is tracking and logging it in real time. Useful “weather apps” and “GPS apps” are the worst violators. Where you work, where you shop, where you live, where your kids go to school...
Ever wonder why all that shows up are ads for competing pharmacies right after you just visited a pharmacy? Or competing grocery store ads right after you just went grocery shopping?
Turn off all permissions for all apps, the convenience is not worth the lack of privacy.
You eat that JUNK FOOD, and shop at that JUNK STORE! Man, you are one crappy person, living that lifestyle. How about you GROW UP a bit and only eat at local restaurants and only shop at locally owned stores?
Man, get a life.
I set mine to “only when in use” if I use an app.
I use very few apps.
Gee what about Google, Facebook, Twitter,.... Maybe a few hundred thousand complaints to the DA about the exact same thing would earn the DA a few Million Dollars in Campaign Funding??
Don't assume that turning off permissions will actually deny access to the information.
What gets me is how many willingly give permission to access “contacts” without ever questioning the fact that the app has no just or needed reason to even access their contact data at all. There is probably not one app that truly needs access to your private contact list to function as advertised.
Almost all ask for it but never truly need it for any reason at all, but we foolishly give it anyways just because they asked. This is in your face personal data mining. If it won’t work without this access, fine, there are other resources or you don’t really need it and can do without it.
All the carriers are selling your location too.
All this spying needs to be stopped.
#4 You are some sort of radical.
One day you will be rounded up by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez :)
Good for you... It’s a start... Know how many apps I have had turn themselves back on during an update? Especially the weather apps, they won’t take no for an answer. I just removed them all and can live without them.
It only takes a few extra seconds to pull up a website and zoom in on a map to find my local weather. Same with everything apps can provide, you can find everything you want without giving ANY permissions to anyone, just takes slightly more personal effort and brain power.
What’s happened is we as a culture do not want to make the effort to think for ourselves anymore, we want everything to think for us, Our cars... our phones... Anything that helps keep us from wasting the time and effort to think. And those who would take advantage of and profit from this fact just absolutely love it, encourage it, and we fall for it.
Absolutely. Uninstall them.
IMO, we Americans are subjected to far too much advertising.
IMO, if we want to be subjected to less of that abuse of our time, a tax on that “nuisance” should be implemented.
I think that if the IRS would limit the tax deductibility of “advertising expenses” to, say, $1,000,000 per year, America would go a long way towards reducing this “nuisance”.
The most powerful “big businesses” would then have a financial reason to reconsider the effectiveness of their offensive advertising campaigns and programs. Hopefully, they would then decide to stop cluttering up our internet with their annoying “push-ads”.
Meanwhile, “small businesses” and individuals could still advertise their products and services in their local markets, ideally, in NEW local news publications.
If my proposed new advertising tax triggers the re-birth of small news publishers, that would reduce the power of those modern “news” conglomerates that are now perverting our ideal of a “free press”.
And that is the problem. To have complete trust in government or others having your data “to keep us safe” with the “not doing anything wrong and got nothing to hide” mentality there will indeed come a day when it does backfire and you will definitely wish they did not have it and kick yourself in the rear for ever thinking it was OK.
There has got to be a red line limit to this, digging through everyone’s underwear drawer “for our own good to keep us safe” is definitely not right or just, it is a huge overreach and abuse of power that will be abused even further in the future.
ML/NJ
Here’s a reality... Phone apps are remote controls controlling your brain. lol
My iPhone has a GPS setting that makes the apps ask for permission to use my location which I use.
That helps... I keep mine turned off all the time because like you say... it could still be accessed without you knowing. I just pull up an online map and use that long lost skill of reading maps.
I will admit though that I have “temporarily” turned it on for a few very handy temporary apps and then turned it off and uninstalled the app when done. Like using a satellite finder/aimer app for setting up a dish. Very handy tool if you have ever done this.
Unfortunately certain elements of basic geographic tower pinging always remain on and there is not much to be done about this. It has been a mobile communications standard to comply with the 911 emergency system for many years now. But it is not at all like GPS.
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