Cybersecurity & Standards, Privacy & Data
How Phones Can Help Predict Thunderstorms
Atlantic:
In the last five years, however, the number of pressure sensors in the world has exploded. That’s because smartphone manufacturers have started putting them in their phones, mainly to help determine a device’s altitude for location tracking: Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones have packed barometers since 2011, and the feature came to Apple’s iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in 2014.
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But it’s important to thoroughly anonymize the readings if they’re going to be sent to a third party. Since barometric pressure can reveal a person’s altitude—one of the three pieces of information that are needed to locate a point in three-dimensional space—it can help someone piece together a device’s location. What’s more, future versions of the data-gathering app may string together a phone’s pressure readings under a random identifier and pair them with location information in order to improve accuracy, which could reveal an individual device’s daily travel patterns.
“Altitude is potentially as sensitive as other geolocation information, which is highly sensitive,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, in an email. He recommended trying to convince businesses or the government to take the readings to avoid invading smartphone users’ privacy.
