Facebook And Location Tracking In iOS 13

September 19, 2019
2 min read

As we’ve seen last week with Spotify, the use of location tracking can be explained with business interest – they want users to stop abusing the Family Premium plan. What Facebook is doing after all the scandals it had with our data, is unexplainable.

In the recent Newsroom article titled “Understanding Updates to Your Device’s Location Settings”, the social network company explains how updates to Android and iOS will prevent them from abusing the constant location tracking.

Facebook is better with location. It powers features like check-ins and makes planning events easier. It helps improve ads and keep you and the Facebook community safe. Features like Find Wi-Fi and Nearby Friends use precise location even when you’re not using the app to make sure that alerts and tools are accurate and personalized for you.

Just read the fucking quote. Facebook tracking your location to keep you safe. How delirious are they? Article further explains, that now there will be the ability in OS to allow location sharing with the app only once and if the app is tracking your location in the background with the app closed, iOS will prompt you with notification, showing map of the location data and explanation why the app uses it (to keep you safe, of course).

This article shows how bad these changes are for Facebook. Right now location tracking is the best data they can get on users. Knowing where you’ve been can give a lot of insights. Which neighborhood do you live in, where do you work, which type of restaurants you go to, if you are sick, how often do you travel. All of this information can be gathered using the background location tracking, without users even noticing.

I’m glad both Google and Apple are making changes to the location tracking in theirs OS’s. I’m sure Facebook will find a way to track it anyway, they say so in the article:

We may still understand your location using things like check-ins, events and information about your internet connection.

This article shows how out of touch Facebook is, but the more scary thing is – people believe them. I hope those changes will educate people more on the type of data they are sending to those companies.

Spotify Now Requiring Users to Share Location Data to Prevent Abuse of Family Plan

September 16, 2019
2 min read

As spotted by CNET, Spotify updated its terms and conditions for Premium Family subscribers, where it now says, that users have to provide location data “from time to time” to ensure that plan members are actually living at the same address.

What is interesting, Spotify tried to do the same thing one year ago, but was met with such a backlash that it had to stop, until now, when they just added this to the terms and conditions.

Although in the description of the Family plan it specifies that plan members should be ‘members of the same household’, people take the name of the plan quite literally and point out that it is not a prerequisite for being a family to live under the same roof.

This is one of those things, where legitimate users have to suffer because of the abusers. In the reports about the news it is mentioned that friends use the feature to pay less ($15 per month divided by six users is just $2.50), but groups all over the internet and social networks are full of messages where people are looking for “family members” to share the plan with. Most of them don’t even know each other.

Still, even if I understand what Spotify tries to prevent, this is the reason to leave the service. Today location data is a king and providing it to the music service is just stupid. Sure they say that they will delete location data right away, but who believes them anymore? The price of not deleting and apologizing later is much lower than what they can get selling or using the data.

I’ve been thinking recently about switching as everyone is so positive about recommendation engine (didn’t work for me previously), but after that I’m definitely staying on Apple Music with my Family Plan.