Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations

http://blog.valverde.me/2014/01/07/foursquare-constantly-tracking-users-locations/

by valverde • 13 years ago

79 46 13 years ago

blog.valverde.me

AndrewTerry• 13 years ago

FWIW, in the IOS version of the app, the offending check box appears to be disabled by default.

(I certainly didn't disable it, so I can only assume that's the state from install).

valverde6• 13 years ago

Interesting. I created a test account just to be sure I hadn't accidentally opted in before and, sure enough, it was enabled.

dblacc• 13 years ago

Same situation here. Wasn't enabled at all, and I've certainly not changed the settings in the past.

joshbaptiste• 13 years ago

The second portion of the post which explains how to capture traffic leaving your device is more informative and probably should have been the main thesis rather than focusing on Foursquare's non-surprising use of constant geo location updates.

valverde6• 13 years ago

Thank you for the feedback. That was my original intention, but seeing the constant location updates from Foursquare while writing the article surprised me (admittedly not too much).

Breefield• 13 years ago

While recently digging into CoreLocation's CLLocationManager recently I also discovered that any app which is given location privileges can be saving your location every 10 min in the background. It was a surprise to me too.

jervisfm2• 13 years ago

How did you get the Proxy Settings screen ? Is that a separate app that you need to install ?

fintler2• 13 years ago

It was enabled for me by default, but the iOS location icon is always displayed on the Springboard when it's being used.

Also, Foursquare will constantly send you notifications saying "It looks like you're near Foobar, would you like to check in?". They make it very, very obvious that they're tracking your location.

It was a quick matter of going into preferences and looking to see what applications used location services recently to fix things up. The biggest offenders were Foursquare and the Google app. I ended up turning Google off completely, and disabled Foursquare except for when I have the app open. Problem solved.

salemh• 13 years ago

I could see the notifications of locations helpful if it was "trained" (Netflix learning algo style) after a time, but the time to "train" the learning/notifications wouldn't be worth the annoyance of the high-frequency of popups.

I wonder if they have tried frequency intervals/usage/checkins.

Even Netflix (anecdote) took perhaps a year or more until recommendations "fit" my profile.

kkwok• 13 years ago

Have you seen noticeable battery life improvements?

fintler2• 13 years ago

No. However, this is a newer iPhone 5 and I plug it in every night -- so I really don't pay attention to the battery.

Older models, or not plugging it in every night, might show something different.

chubot• 13 years ago

BTW here is a nice project I came across that should do the same thing as Fiddler, but it's for Linux rather than Windows:

http://mitmproxy.org/

To decrypt HTTPS you follow the same procedure of installing a root certificate on your phone.

valverde6• 13 years ago

Thanks! I added that to the article.

205guy• 13 years ago

There is also burp (http://portswigger.net/burp/) that is distributed as a JAR.

angryasian• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure there are a lot of apps that have similar behavior. I know at one time Twitter and Facebook did something similar.

soneca2• 13 years ago

Does Facebook still do that? Do you remember where you read that it did at one time?

valverde6• 13 years ago

I had Facebook installed while investigating for this article, and could not identify a similar behavior.

Google, on the other hand, did the exact same thing, but I remember explicitly agreeing to that.

chippy• 13 years ago

Does this also work if the user has signed out of Foursquare? (on Android?)

newman314• 13 years ago

I wish there was an OS option that does the equivalent of "Only permit location based service calls when app is open and active"

I want the option of enabling Yelp only when I use Yelp etc.

37prime• 13 years ago

I beleive that in iOS 7 you could disable Background App Refresh for apps like Foursquare and Yelp.

stevenp• 13 years ago

This is true, and Foursquare does use Background Refresh, but I don't believe that encompasses background location updates, so changing the setting to disable them in Foursquare is still necessary.

drdeadringer• 13 years ago

A company focused on enabling users to report their own locations... knows the locations of their users.

I am not surprised.

prodigal_erik• 13 years ago

A service known for letting you announce your location ... now knows your location even when you haven't announced it.

msoad• 13 years ago

Because of this I assume companies will start encrypting their JSON to make it impossible to see what is going through their application. A lot of lawsuits can start from this kind of exploring.

valverde6• 13 years ago

Making it impossible is impossible. They might make it more difficult.

spellboots2• 13 years ago

On iOS this isn't necessarily true under certain constraints.

They can make it impossible given the device is not jailbroken. Sometimes there are versions of iOS that are un-jailbreakable. If you are not Apple, it could very well be impossible to figure out what an app is sending to a remote service if it gets its cryptography right.

Edit: thinking about it, although it may be impossible to MITM the connection, presumably one can inspect the compiled application to determine what it would send, so I think I was wrong about this

spellboots2• 13 years ago

Is this not the entire point of Foursquare?

dreamdu5t• 13 years ago

Yeah I thought the same thing. FourSquare is a location-based social network and game. The entire thing is built on knowing your location.

amirmc2• 13 years ago

Seems like you're commenting based only on the title. Here's the first sentence of the article:

"It might sound weird to accuse Foursquare of collecting location data since that is the whole point of the service, but Foursquare is overstepping its bounds by constantly keeping track of their users' every move (and more) — even if they never open the app."

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Still not surprised. This is a textbook example of why Apple originally refused to allow apps to run in the background- so now that Apple finally caved and apps can background, it was just a matter of time before exactly this sort of thing came up.

hdouble• 13 years ago

Hard to blame Foursquare which you need to install while Google itself is doing it on Android phones to track when Android phones enter stores.

http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/

jamesaguilar• 13 years ago

(I think) that this is an opt-in feature that came out a few months ago, so that 4sq could push suggestions to you about where you are, or notify you of nearby friends. At least, I remember being asked if I wanted this feature.

driverdan• 13 years ago

Not all users. I primarily use Foursquare for tracking where I've been, not for discovery. If I try to remember that great place I ate at last time I was in Boston I can search my history. Invasive continuous tracking adds no value for me.

amirmc2• 13 years ago

Another way to achieve the same thing might be to take pictures at the locations you want to remember. The geo-tagging can help you locate where the pic was taken (though you'd probably need a pic of the name of the place for this to work well).

debt• 13 years ago

Nah. Check-ins only seems to be the point. They don't need to constantly track my location.

nikoftime• 13 years ago

I'm on an iPhone 5S and it significantly diminishes my working battery life unless I manually close the app.

jgalt212• 13 years ago

growth hacking

devinegan• 13 years ago

The WiFi scan data is interesting. I guess Google maps cars have made it ok for corporations to War Drive at massive scale. But using your users devices to do it for you is interesting.

Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations

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