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Researchers Propose Tighter Consumer Privacy Controls
- Motherboard, Wednesday, July 6, 2016 10:57 AM
On most mobile devices nowadays, location privacy is an all-or-nothing deal: You either allow applications to track you all the time, or you turn off the location setting and suffer the inconvenience of having to turn it back on every time you use the app. Both Apple and Google have improved this in recent years, adding granular controls to their mobile operating systems that allow users to permit or deny individual apps access to their device's location. But while that might be sufficient to prevent a sketchy flashlight app from snooping on you, it's still not quite enough to stop apps that might legitimately need your location from constantly running in the background and recording everywhere you go. Thus, a group of researchers from UCLA have proposed what they call LocationSafe, a privacy module that would give users fine-grained control over location privacy—with an eye towards combating the recent onslaught of privacy-invading Internet of Things devices.
