Hackers steal ‘intimate’ location data from users of thousands of apps
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Russian-speaking hackers are believed to have stolen a huge trove of location data pulled from people’s phones around the world. Tens of millions of phone coordinates pinged through the use of thousands of popular apps are said to have been accessed.
Experts said the information can be used to reveal ‘intimate’ details of people’s movements down to whether they were using their phone on the bus or on the toilet. A post which appeared earlier this month on a well-known hacking forum contained a 1.4-gigabyte sample of what the author claimed to be more than 10,000 gigabytes of data taken from Gravy Analytics, a company which collects location data from phone use and sells it on.
A number of cyber security experts have analysed the sample and said it appears to be real information linked to the use of popular apps. The apps include Spotify, Citymapper, Tinder, Grindr, Candy Crush, Temple Run, My Period Calendar & Tracker and MyFitnessPal, according to a list of thousands compiled by tech news outlet 404 Media.
The companies behind many of the named apps have said they do not work with Gravy Analytics, and some have said they do not track user location data at all. Spotify claims it has confirmed that ‘no Spotify user data is involved in this hack’, while Tinder said it found ‘no evidence that this data was obtained from the Tinder app’.
