https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/10/07/help-us-find-the-apps-that-sell-your-location * Ask The Markup * Google the Giant * Blacklight * Investigations * Citizen Browser * Locked Out * Denied * Working for an Algorithm Search term [ ] * About Us * Donate * Events * Have a Tip? * Jobs * Newsletters * Team * Facebook * Twitter * Instagram * RSS Feed We need your input: Take our survey Skip navigation Menu The Markup Donate * About Us * Donate Big Tech Is Watching You. We're Watching Big Tech. Privacy Help Us Find the Apps That Sell Your Location Send us screenshots or share your knowledge of the location data industry By Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng October 7, 2021 08:00 ET Illustration of several abstract characters standing in a maze of stairs. Location pins and coins are scattered throughout the piece. Share This Article Copy Link Republish Last week we wrote about the estimated $12 billion market for your phone's location data. We identified 47 companies that play one of the many roles in the location data pipeline: providers, buyers, sellers, and aggregators. Now we need your help finding a missing piece of the data pipeline: the mobile phone apps that harvest and share location data with the industry. Report Deeply and Fix Things Because it turns out moving fast and breaking things broke some super importantthings. Give Now After looking through dozens of companies' websites and privacy policies, we found a lack of transparency about the origin of the data that fuels their businesses. Buried in privacy policies, you will find lots of mentions of "trusted data partners," but one thing was missing in nearly all of the sites we looked at: the names of the mobile apps that actually collect your location and movement data. Some of the companies we looked at told The Markup that they don't publicly disclose what apps they get location data from, in order to keep a competitive advantage, but maintained that their process of obtaining location data was transparent and with clear consent from app users. We want to shed some light on which apps are involved in this pipeline. Here's how you can help. - link App Asking for Your Location? Send Us a Screenshot Some apps need your location to function properly, but others have no obvious need to know where you are at a given moment. Some of the most common apps that provide location data are for weather, navigation, and discounts, we've found. Employers and schools may also require apps that collect location data. [gasbuddy-i] [gasbuddy-a] Two screenshots, side-by-side, of Gas Buddy app on phone screens, one Android, one iOS, each showing the prompt "Allow 'GasBuddy' to use your location?" Prompts asking for permission to access location data from the Android (left) and iOS (right) versions of the GasBuddy app. Source: GasBuddy Take a moment the next time an app asks for your location to think about whether there's a clear reason for sharing it. If you are at all suspicious, take a screenshot when you see the request on your screen. Here are some instructions on how to take a screenshot. Then simply email the screenshot and the name of the app to location@themarkup.org, and we'll develop a list of apps to further check out. This will help us understand how these prompts are worded and could help us identify apps that are using your location in ways the app developer does not disclose. Your privacy is extremely important to us, so we won't post your screenshot or use your name. We'll use your email only if one of our reporters has a question for you. - link Do You Work with Location Data? We are interested in speaking with people who are working in industries that may be collecting, using, buying, or selling this data. * Do you work in location-based mobile advertising? * Has your company purchased location data before? * Does your employer or school require you to use an app that asks for your location? * Are you an app developer, or have you worked with SDKs that monetize location data? * Do you process or analyze location data from mobile devices? We'd like to hear from you. What does the location data industry look like from where you sit? Are there any aspects of this industry that we should be looking at? You can send an email to keegan@themarkup.org, or you can reach Jon securely on Signal at 646-355-8306. Real quick ... As technology extends its reach into all corners of culture and blackbox algorithms reshape our lives in untold ways, The Markup is working to bring it all into focus. We're a nonprofit newsroom that brings tech expertise to tech reporting. We pursue hard-hitting, data-driven analyses and hold powerful institutions to account. Independent journalism is essential to a healthy society, and your support is essential to independent journalism. Support The Markup Now You just read Help Us Find the Apps That Sell Your Location From the series -- Privacy Share This Article Copy Link Republish Credits * [0011_Jon-6] Jon Keegan Investigative Data Journalist * Headshot of Alfred Ng Alfred Ng Reporter Close Republish Help Us Find the Apps That Sell Your Location We're happy to make this story free and available to republish for free under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Creative Commons license. This allows you to republish the article, but does not include the images or graphics other than the credit image. You must credit The Markup. If The Markup credit image is incompatible with your CMS, please let us know if you remove it. To republish, simply copy the HTML that we have provided and publish it as-is on your website. The provided HTML snippet includes all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to The Markup. Please drop us a line to let us know if you've republished the story at president@themarkup.org. [Some placeholder tex] Copy HTML The Latest Illustration of a hand holding a phone with a QR code and checkmark, surrounded by a vaccine card, a syringe, vaccine bottles and a DNA strand. Ask The MarkupPrivacy How Can You Safely Store Your Vaccine Status on Your Phone? Vaccine cards don't actually contain very much sensitive information, but you can protect it nonetheless October 5, 2021 08:00 ET Illustration of several abstract characters standing in a maze of stairs. Location pins and coins are scattered throughout the piece. Privacy There's a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone's Location Data A huge but little-known industry has cropped up around monetizing people'smovements September 30, 2021 08:00 ET Illustration of man in construction hat and safety vest working at a utility pole. To the right of him is an internet router with wifi signals around it. Ask The Markup What's Missing from the Infrastructure Bill's $65 Billion Broadband Plan? The proposal would represent a "once in a generation" investment in broadband networks. Here's what it would do, and what it leaves out September 28, 2021 08:00 ET Return to The Markup's homepage Your contributions help us investigate how technology influences our society. 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