Security researcher Will Strafach identified that famous Weather App AccuWeather sending geolocation data to third party data mining firm.
He intercepted the traffic with the latest version of AccuWeather from his iPhone and it appears Wi-Fi router name and its unique MAC address to the servers of data monetization even if the App not permitted for sharing location OR even when the user has switched off location sharing.
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If you don’t provide permission to access GPS information, still it can manage to send your Wi-Fi router name and BSSID to Revealmobile, and they have access to less precise location data relating to your device’s whereabouts says Strafach.
https://twitter.com/chronic/status/899773823532380160
At the point when the location is empowered, it sends the down-to-the-meter exact directions of the client, including pace and latitude, back to the data mining firm.Says ZDNet.
ZDNet finds that data mining firm isn’t an immediate publicizer however instead helps give data to advertisers.Reveal in a brochure says that it turns the location data commencing of these apps into what it claims to be “meaningful audience knowledge.”
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Reveal has stated that the SDK could be misconstrued, and they assure that no reverse engineering of locations was ever conducted by any information they gathered, nor was that the intent.
ACCUWEATHER AND REVEAL MOBILE JOINT STATEMENT ON iOs APPS: https://t.co/5XWpxZhSOH
— Breaking Weather by AccuWeather (@breakingweather) August 22, 2017
“In the future, AccuWeather plans to use data through Reveal Mobile for audience segmentation and analysis, to build a greater audience understanding and create more contextually relevant and helpful experiences for users and for advertisers,” said David Mitchell, AccuWeather’s executive vice president of emerging platforms, on the call with ZDNet.
