There was big news from the Washington Post today – privacy is dead – even on the iPhone. Why? They found 5,400 app trackers sending locating data back to the developers via frequent pings throughout the day and night.

But is this really BIG news??

We all know – or we should that even devices marketed as boosting privacy like the iPhone are not totally secure. Many have experienced mentioning a company or idea and suddenly seeing related ads.

It’s quite spooky.

We are surrounded by so many smart speakers and phone and tablet microphones and Google itself is an MVNO, that it is almost impossible to determine who and what is listening.

Here is a great excerpt from the article written by Geoffrey A. Fowler:

According to privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month. That’s half of an entire basic wireless service plan from AT&T.

The bottom line is privacy is dead – in the electronic age, there seems to be a massive loss of privacy and even on the one-year anniversary of GDPR, it seems things are less private today than ever before.

And it will continue to get worse. Even on devices trying to protect you – or at least claiming to.

Big Data, AI and ML will only make the situation worse – enabling aggregators to track every move you make and know you almost better than you know yourself.

All you can do is be aware of this trend and be careful what apps you download and what permissions you set.