5 years ago
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Los Angeles Accuses Weather Channel App of Covertly Mining User Data
In a lawsuit on Thursday, the city attorney said tracking was used not just for local forecasts but also for commercial purposes like targeted marketing.
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https://www.nytimes.com
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This does not surprise me. I had the Weather Channel app sometime last year, and it was using up huge amounts of data, much more than it should have, so I deleted it and chose another app. I had location turned off, but even so it was sending lots of data back and forth. A weather app should not need to do that.
Agreed...Therre is only one reason hey do that and we all know what that is.
Yeah. At the time, when I looked at data usage by apps on my phone and saw it chewing through my data allocation, I naively put it down to extremely inefficient programming by app developers. (And that alone would be enough for me to delete the app) - but later when I read about apps like The Weather Channel tracking users, then I realized that this was what was going on instead.
Now, I periodically review the breakdown of data usage by app on my phone. Anything that uses more data than it should, I delete. Basically anything that uses more than my browser (the app I use most often) I will delete. This is not a complete guard against privacy-violating apps, but I figure that it at least will help me identify any big red flags.