How Advertising Libraries in Mobile Apps Enable a Massive Location Surveillance Apparatus
William Budington,
Lena Cohen
Last year at HOPE, William discussed the dangers of location data brokers tracking billions of people through mobile apps and selling their location to the highest bidder. This year, he’ll dive deeper into how and why mobile apps betray our location privacy. Advertising libraries included in a vast array of apps can transmit location data from your device sensors to surveillance tools available to the government and sold on the open market. While parts of this data pipeline remain shrouded by corporate secrecy, we can shine light on its starting point through analysis of the SDKs powering advertisements and harvesting location data in our mobile apps. You will learn the findings from looking at these components at EFF’s Threat Lab, techniques that are used to investigate apps, and conclusions about what is needed to stop mobile advertising from fueling the location surveillance industry.
Friday 2000 Crystal Ballroom
William Budington is a longtime activist, cryptography enthusiast, and a senior staff technologist on EFF ’s public interest technology team. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, and cited by the U.S. Congress. His primary interest lies in dismantling systems of oppression, building up collaborative alternatives and, to borrow a phrase from Zapatismo, fighting for a “world in which many worlds fit.” He loves hacker spaces and getting together with other techies to tinker, code, share, and build the technological commons.
Lena Cohen is a staff technologist primarily focused on developing Privacy Badger - a browser extension used by over three million people to stop companies from tracking their activity as they browse the web. At EFF, Lena also works on issues of commercial surveillance, the data broker industry, and consumer privacy. Lena holds a degree in computer science and in science, technology, and society from Brown University.
