Does my Android phone track my movements?

I just had a nosey round the backend of our work newsletter email system, having not done so before.

In a few minutes I had drilled down to a particular reader, what links she followed, what OS and phone model (a new one, as last newsletter was on a different phone) what carrier and where her IP address was located (outside Bookers in Hatfield) and her family members email address that she forwarded it too…. 😯

Whilst I was reading this an advert came on tv for a program called hunted on channel 4 where some normal people have to try & disappear for 28 days and evade capture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . hope they’ve all chucked their phones 😆

Should be worth watching, if you actually think about it the amount of surveillance and tracking of your movements that goes on in everyday life is quite worrying 😯

Aside from the fact that Google does indeed track your every movement, just as they track everything you browse on the web, in the case of the O2 “text” there are a number of methods of doing Proximity Marketing.

Basically if you have Bluetooth enabled and publically visible you can get messages via Bluetooth at certain venues, or in my case I’ve had them in shopping centres.

NFC is another way but you have to be close to something for that to work.

And apparently proximity marketing via SMS is also possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_marketing

Phone companies do record information about which phones are connected to which masts, when and for how long. By showing the trail of connections people’s movements can be tracked and reconstructed. This data is always recorded and you (as the user) cannot opt out.

The data is used by criminal justice agencies investigating criminal offences (it is known as cell site data and cell site analysis) and by the phone companies for billing (what services you used, when and where) and for their network management (which masts carry which workloads and when – so they can look after or change their infrastructure as required)