Current Events #3

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For $1000, anyone can purchase online ads to track your location and app use

In the article, "For $1000, anyone can purchase online ads to track your location and app use" stated the following: "Privacy concerns have long swirled around how much information online advertising networks collect about people’s browsing, buying and social media habits, typically to sell you something. But could someone use mobile advertising to learn where you go for coffee? Could a burglar establish a sham company and send ads to your phone to learn when you leave the house? Could a suspicious employer see if you’re using shopping apps on work time?

The answer to this question they believed was to be yes. They did research at the University of Washington research. They also found out that for roughly $1000 someone can purchase and target online advertising in ways that allow them to track the location of other individuals and learn what apps they are using. 

"The answer is yes, at least in theory. New University of Washington research to be presented in a paper on October 30 at the Association for Computing Machinery’s workshop on privacy in the Electronic Society, suggests that for roughly $1,000, someone with devious intent can purchase and target online advertising in ways that allow them to track the location of other individuals and learn what apps they are using." Lead author Paul Vines, a recent doctoral graduate in the UW’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering said the following, “Anyone from a foreign intelligence agent to a jealous spouse can pretty easily sign up with a large internet advertising company and on a fairly modest budget use these ecosystems to track another individual’s behavior." The research team set out to test whether an adversary could exploit the existing online advertising infrastructure for personal surveillance and, if so, raise industry awareness about the threat.

 My thoughts on this article is that, it is both a good and bad thing from different perspectives. It's good because it's a smart way of locating where someone is, if they're lost or missing. It is bad because it can give anyone your location, and they can find you.

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