Locating your data

Good afternoon everyone and welcome back to ToBeSecured. There is a lot I will like to speak about on today’s post, but I will try to keep it brief. I took a month off to focus on the outside world, observe the behavior of users interaction with technology, and enjoy my last few weeks of undergrad at my prestigious institution. Within my last few weeks of undergrad, I had the pleasure of presenting my capstone project to my advisor and classmates: ToBeSecured. ToBeSecured is near and dear to my heart and I have a strong passion for informing and educating everyone on why the three factors of my blog are critical in today’s society.

For those of you who are unaware, I attended Southern University and A&M College. On May 10, 2019 at 10:00 am, I received my bachelors of science in Computer Science. This was a tremendous accomplishment and milestone and I hope my success has inspired my surrounding peers to obtain a higher education. I am a first generation college graduate departing my institution with a 3.4 cumulative GPA and I will be returning this fall to obtain a masters in cyber security. Also, I graduated with a full time job with Baker Hughes at GE. I cannot thank everyone enough for molding me into the woman I am today and helping me to succeed in this life.

As I took some time off to gather some fresh air, enjoying spring break and the company of family, friends, and loved ones, it dawned on me that I should invest more time into my blog to reach a wider range of users. Today, I decided to stop procrastinating and draft up a post for you all. I will be discussing different posts and articles I constantly run across that covers the topic of location services and the harm it brings to us via social media.

Not too long ago, maybe last week or so, I was able to obtain the cell phones of close friends and siblings of mine. They all had their location services enabled on their devices and thought nothing was wrong with it. Even after explaining the disadvantages of not disabling the feature, one person still had the perception of the location services feature cannot bring them harm and that they’ll be fine. There will be people in this lifetime who are closed minded and will not let up. I cannot guarantee everyone will do what is right and be cautious of new technological advances but I can guarantee the constant information I will utilize to educate my peers and others in the world.

There were 3 signs I acknowledged that motivated me to draft up this post.

The first sign was weeks ago when I was on my way to a concert. While in the backseat of the driver’s car, I noticed they were utilizing their location services feature to reach our destination. I thought nothing of it until we got there and they closed out of all their apps and locked their phone. If you know me, I’m a quiet person and I will sit and observe my surroundings. Something told me to ask if they had disabled their location services, which I already knew they hadn‘t. I received the answer I needed and explained why I asked and what could be the result if they left it enabled.

The second sign was when I opened the Instagram application last week and I constantly seen my followers posting their location on their pictures. It was at this moment when I became furious on the inside and I reached out to some of my close friends about posting to my blog. It amazes me how people will sit and criticize those on movies and tv shows but perform the same actions in real life.

The third sign was last night when I opened the Twitter application and came across a picture titled “A bug impacting your privacy”. After reading the post, I figured that was strike three and I needed to act. I took a screenshot of the post and sent it to one of my friends to receive their thoughts on the situation. After discussing it, I decided when I wake the next day I would draft up a post.

I inserted the image I took a screenshot of last night so you all can read and interpret for yourselves. After reading “where we inadvertently collected some iOS location data. We then shared this inadvertently collected location data.....”, I didn’t want to read any further. I had gathered enough information from the post thus far. Fortunately, I did not receive this notice because they aren’t able to collect my location if it is not enabled and I only have one account. Unfortunately, others were affected and by the looks of this post, they had questions they wanted answers to.

There are 2 things I wanted to address as well as reiterate while writing this post.

1.) When creating an account on any platform, it is critical to read the terms and conditions that will give you a breakdown of the information they’re tapping into and using from your profile.

2.) “Inadvertently“ collecting your data means Twitter had a bug that accidentally collected user data and shared it with a partner of theirs for advertising purposes. But apparently the collected information was then shared with a trusted partner for purposes of serving ads through a process called real-time bidding, but assuaged any privacy concerns by stating the location data was “fuzzed” to reduce its accuracy to the nearest zip code or city.

According to the post, the bug only affected iOS users of its Twitter app who had a second account on their phones. So if users had allowed Twitter to access precise location data on one account, the setting would automatically be applied to the other account(s), even when they did not opt in to location data sharing.

This security issue is Twitter’s fourth bug incident in the past year.

If you would like to discuss further, please leave a comment or ask a question. I'd love to chat with my readers and hear your thoughts. Thank you for dropping in and remember ToBeSecured!

This is a screenshot from yesterday evening around 7:30 pm. This is the message users who were affected received notifying them of the incident and what steps they can take to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.