The iPhone can be secretly tracked online by anyone who is willing to pay for it. Possibly millions of people have already been followed unwantedly in this way.
iPhone can be secretly tracked online
The BNR website comes to this conclusion. He obtained more than 80 gigabytes of location data. This data is sold online and contains the coordinates of millions of telephones, which are registered dozens of times a day.
This enormous mountain of data also contained data of people with an important position. This made it possible to follow an army officer as he visited various military locations.
This is just a small example from the enormous amount of data. Many more important people can be followed in the data. For example, the researchers were able to say that up to 370 telephones were registered at the Volkel Air Base, a storage point for nuclear weapons.
This technique that allows you to secretly track an iPhone is actually designed for use by advertisers. They can use these large amounts of ‘anonymous’ data for their advertising purposes.
What does your data cost?
The prices for all this data are not too bad. A subscription to the location data of mobile phones in the Netherlands is available from $2,000 per month. But if you pay a little more money, it is even possible to get new data every day.
These traders are ‘fully liable’ on their own platform for the data they offer. Data providers claim on their websites that they comply with European privacy legislation. Users themselves would give permission for their data to be shared, but experts do not entirely agree with this.
Have your iPhone tracked (less).
There is not much you can do about data being collected from you. You will then no longer be able to carry an iPhone or other smartphone with you. Your iPhone always transmits some data in one way or another, this can be done via an app but also via functions such as Find My.
You can limit the transmission of data to third parties. You can do this, among other things, by turning off tracking requests from apps.
- Open the Settings app;
- Scroll down and tap ‘Privacy & Security’;
- Tap ‘Tracking’;
- Turn off the ‘Allow tracking requests from apps’ option.
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