location tracking

If you’re uncomfortable with social media apps tracking your movements, or worried about data falling into the wrong hands, here’s how to stop them using your iPhone’s built-in location settings.

If you find yourself traveling to a country with an authoritarian government, clearing your phone’s location history is a safe bet. Or if you’re moving to a different city or to a new job, it can be annoying seeing travel suggestions to the wrong place. Resetting your location history will start from a clean slate.

These moves may also protect you from shady data brokers, who spy on and sell your movements. Here’s how.

This affordable personal alarm combines personal security with smart tracking — and it’s small enough to fit on your keychain. You can activate its powerful siren and bright LED light if you find yourself in any type of emergency. It can alert nearby people or maybe even scare off whatever is threatening you.

Plus, the Two-in-One Safety Alarm works with Apple’s Find My network, so you can quickly locate it if you happen to misplace whatever you attach it to. And with this deal, this tiny safety gadget costs less than a single AirTag!

Normally $39.99, this little piece of EDC emergency gear is now on sale for just $23.99. And you can save even more if you buy a two-pack.

A massive breach revealed last week exposed location data from apps on millions of iPhones and Android phones. But at least iPhone users have better protection against exposure through a simple action they can take against app tracking, a new report noted Monday.

Gravy Analytics, one of the world’s largest location data brokers, disclosed the big data breach last week. Leaked data points came from smartphone apps ranging from popular mobile games like Candy Crush to dating apps and pregnancy-tracking applications. While investigations into the breach continue, experts point out that iPhones and iPads have a pretty simple way of avoiding exposure in the first place.

AirPods are great earphones, but did you know they can also be crime fighters? In Florida, a dislodged AirPod tracked an alleged hit-and-run driver after a bike-riding teen’s head went through his passenger window and the earbud popped out and got stuck under a floormat.

Location tracking on that little earbud led straight to an arrest on felony charges.

Thieves in Canada have apparently found an unintended and novel use for Apple’s AirTag locator devices. They use them to track cars they’d like to steal.

Location data, for a long time a river of gold that enriched companies with digital ad revenues, is starting to dry up as more and more consumers deactivate location tracking on their smartphones.

The growing shortage of GPS data became pronounced shortly after the launch iOS 13, which features a pop-up option to cut off tracking if your iPhone detects an app gathering data on your whereabouts.

The GeoZilla GPS Tracker can find your dog if he gets out of the yard, even if he takes a plane to Reno. Or it can locate your lost luggage if the airline accidentally ships it to Australia.

There are plenty of tracking tags that can discover your keys in your living room, but the GeoZilla GPS Tracker uses built-in cellular-wireless access so it can be found anywhere.

Read on to find out if this is the ultra-portable global tracker you’ve been hoping for.

The CEOs of the big four US wireless carriers were asked by an FCC commissioner whether they’ve stopped selling their customers’ real-time location data, as they had promised to do.

Published reports in recent months indicated that the locations of Americans were being sold without their permission of even knowledge.

Whether it’s our phones, our fitness trackers, or even something as innocuous as a dating app, much of the technology we use on a regular basis tracks our physical location.

Knowing the potential security risk this poses, the Pentagon banned deployed military personnel from using tech with active location-tracking features.

If you find yourself within the immediate radius of a crime that’s committed, you could find your personal data seized by police, with a helping hand from Google.

That’s the takeaway from a recent report about how Raleigh police have presented Google with broad search warrants, requesting user data from all mobile devices with a certain vicinity of particular crimes. In one case, Google was reportedly asked for unique data for all homes and businesses within a 17-acre area of a gun-related incident.

Much like Google offers personalized searching, macOS Sierra delivers location-based tips as part of its suggestions within Spotlight, Siri, Safari and Maps. That means Apple will try to recommend relevant services within your immediate vicinity.

If you don’t want this feature, however, there is a way to get rid of it. Check out our guide below to show how to do this — and how to turn it back on again if you change your mind.

If you’re afraid of ever being in a dangerous situation without any witnesses or good samaritans nearby, you might want to consider downloading this new app appropriately named Witness. Calling itself the ‘panic button for the smartphone age,’ one tap broadcasts live video and your current location to a list of preset emergency contacts, who can then decide if it’s appropriate to take action.

Of course, if they do nothing, they could potentially have front-row seats to a very morbid and disturbing show.

Smartphone users know that sharing personal data with apps can be part of the price of free apps, but when it comes to how frequently those apps give that data to third parties, the numbers will shock you.

A new study by Carnegie Mellon found that some smartphone users’ data is shared more than 5,000 times with third parties in a two-week period. Most people are totally clueless this is happening, but the study found that when people learn how much frequently data is being shared, they act rapidly to shut down the spread of personal info.

iOS 8 is cruising through the final stages of development ahead of its fall release, and while most users can’t wait for its arrival, one NY-based startup already had to cut a third of its staff, after privacy changes in iOS 8 have threatened to already make its retail tracking technology obsolete.

Nomi, a startup that creates solutions for retail stores to track shoppers and their spending habits, has laid off 20 of its 60 or so employees, thanks in part to some small changes in iOS 8 that make make it impossible to identify repeat visits from shoppers with an iPhone.

“Glue of the Internet” service IFTTT (If This Then That) is one of the most useful services around. Now a new app from developer Visual Candy is giving users the ability to add “location” to their IFTTT recipes.

Keeping tabs on your brood this Halloween? Sure, you could use Apple’s Find My Friends. But it doesn’t have as many cool features as these two new apps, and it also can’t track Android phones — while these two apps can.

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – We’ve seen countless solutions to finding lost car keys over the past few decades, but this latest solution from Treehouse Labs makes the attempt to be practical and fun while solving one of mankind’s greatest problems through an iPhone app. Bikn is a location tracking solution to help you find anything that has a tendency to get lost: dogs, purses, cameras, your grandparents at Wal-Mart, you name it. By attaching a small location tracker to any item you tend to lose, Bikn makes finding things easier than ever.

Apple applied for a broad patent on location tracking services back in September 2009 — the kind of location tracking that is now causing a storm of controversy.

The patent application, entitled “Location Histories for Location Aware Devices,” throws some light on the iPhone tracking issue, which is soon to be the subject of a Senate hearing.