Go ahead and see how many messages in your chats have locations attached. I’m guessing it’s a lot of them. And if this isn’t already starting to get a bit weird, the first thing I noticed when I started to write my code was that the latitude and longitude coordinates of the message locations have more than 5 decimal places of precision, making it possible to pinpoint the sender’s location to less than a meter.
A free messaging app that is the #1 downloaded free app on iOS from a publicly traded company that, at today’s stock price is worth 223 billion that collects no money from their 1 billion users is tracking every location of their users as they send messages and it is following you after you leave Facebook.com to see what other sites you visit and it’s built in at the system level on your phone and desktop and wants to store every relationship, contact, message and photo you’ve ever created.
and we’re willingly giving them more of our information.
I know these group messaging applications are really popular. I’ve never used GroupMe or frankly any group-chat application ever. I use SMS and while the NSA is reading all of those messages, at least there will be some moment when congress can rope in that spying and my tax dollars are going toward it for my ‘safety’. I”m not going to make this about the NSA. My point is, Facebook is a company and their customers are advertisers and they’re tracking your location constantly.
No one is bothered by this?
Back to something I wrote a few days ago that will be posted to this site eventually, my sisters don’t use any of the default applications that came on their iPhones. I don’t know why SnapChat and GroupMe replaced SMS or why Google Inbox replaced Apple Mail or Chrome replaced Safari or Skype replaced FaceTime. Why Spotify is better than iTunes. I don’t know the answer to that but it seems weird that Apple that has fought so hard to promise they won’t store data without your permission, they won’t track you and they won’t sell your data and these apps all come preinstalled on your phone for free yet people still opt to entrust very openly evil corporations with their very personal data.