AccuWeather iOS app sends user's location info to data monetization firm, even with location sharing turned off
it's surprisingly accurate. http://www.zdnet.com/... http://twitter.com/... Charles Arthur / @charlesarthur : Flipping heck. What is it about the greed for data of these companies? They're insatiable. http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The AccuWeather finding lands on top of an established pattern: an Ars Technica survey two years earlier had already shown popular apps shipping email addresses and location to third parties. What makes this report sharper is the bypass — the iOS app transmitted location to a data monetization firm even with location sharing turned off, meaning the operating system's consent toggle was not cutting off the data flow.
First-order effects
- AccuWeather's iOS users had their whereabouts passed to a data broker without effective means of opting out, putting the company's privacy practices under direct public scrutiny.
- The named data monetization firm gained a steady feed of device-level location from a top-ranked weather app, regardless of each user's stated preference.
Second-order effects
- Other high-install utility apps — the category the TechCrunch research on 24 iOS apps later confirmed — faced the same accusation template, forcing developers to audit SDKs they may not have known were transmitting GPS and Wi-Fi identifiers.
- Demand-side buyers of precise location, the advertisers, retailers, and hedge funds the New York Times traced across 75+ companies, kept paying for the supply, giving brokers little incentive to self-police.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry consolidates into the collector-aggregator-marketplace structure later mapped in The Markup's look at the $12B location data business, with carrier-level pipes like LocationSmart's direct connections to AT&T and Verizon sitting above the app layer entirely.
- Consent mechanisms that operate at the app-permission level prove structurally inadequate, pushing the real fix toward regulation and platform-enforced data flows rather than user-facing toggles.
The trend: Consumer location is hardening into a commodity supply chain in which app-store permission switches fail to sever downstream monetization, leaving regulation rather than user control as the binding constraint.