STOP these 12,000 popular apps from tracking you!

0:00 over 12,000 apps have exposed your personal information including your location data in this massive data breach check how we can see someone flying from Columbus Circle in New York to Tennessee where they visited their mother the next day how crazy is that and this tracking is not just from dodgy apps but from some of the biggest and most popular apps on both IOS and Android such as Candy Crush Tinder grinder period tracking apps my fitness pile and even VPN apps so what happened what information was exposed and what should you do about it let's find out okay here is what happened gravy

0:47 analytics is a data broker that collects and sells location data and they were hacked the hacker claims to have stolen 10 terabyt of data that contained billions of location points to prove that they did in fact hack gravy analytics the hacker released a small sample of data about 1.4 GB that data set contained 30 million location points nothing small about that now French security researcher Baptist Robert Robert I'm sorry I'm definitely butchering his name he actually placed these on a map and did a really cool dive on Twitter Now singers should freak you out especially when you think think that this is just a tiny sample want to

1:33 see all the Tinder users in the UK sure how about sensitive locations such as identifying military personnel in Russia or movements around the White House no problem how about this person who was seen at space launch complex 36 went home stopped at Home Depot and visited family near Kansas City it's pretty insane when you see it like this now how did this happen are these 12,000 apps spying on us well here is where it gets interesting we know that these apps have ads when a company wants to place their ad for you to see they basically fight with other companies who also want to place their ads inside the app for you to see so they enter into something

2:20 called realtime bidding essentially it's an auction where they bid against each other and the highest offer wins so they're com gets the space to show their ads but here is where it gets iffy when the bidding is actually going on companies see information about your device such as the Mak and model and a whole bunch of other information they can also get to see the IP address of your device and if you allowed for location data to be used inside that app it's going to give them your precise location they need this in order to be be able to see so that can only serve you ads in a specific City on a specific device so if

3:06 you're in Dallas you may only see ads of things to do in Dallas but the moment you land in Vegas you're going to see Vegas ads but it gets even worse because even companies that did not win this bidding auction they still get your information so these data Brokers can participate and watch these ad auction going on they don't win but they collect all this personal information even though these auctions are technically supposed to be anonymous when these data Brokers combine the data that theyve just picked up with other source of data that they have about you they piece it together and they know exactly who you are they can now track your location and

3:53 basically map out your entire life this is why I keep banging on this drum that you must delete your private information from data broker websites you can use a service that I've been using for years called delete me and there are once again sponsors of this video delete me goes out onto the web and automatically looks for your name your email address your phone number and other personal information once they find it on these data broker websites they act as your agent and they get it removed they literally do this for over 750 dat to broker web websites most of these I would never have found by myself now this process takes time as you can imagine these data Brokers don't really want to lose your information so delete

4:40 me sends you a progress report and the best bit is that when these data Brokers put your information back into their system after they delete it delete me goes ahead and gets it removed again I have a link in the description where you can use code Lon 20 and get 20% off your plan as you can see by this latest massive data breach this is well worth it so these 12,000 apps may not be at fault per se unless of course they're the ones selling your data but the issue is the way these ad networks work inside the apps so what can you do right now to protect yourself well this tracking is possible because of something called advertising ID this is a unique

5:26 identifier that is associated with your device this this allows companies to track your activity across apps for advertising purposes but as we have seen it also allows companies to track your location so what you need to do right now is to disable this and it's very simple to do on both Android and iOS right on your Android phone go into your setting scroll down until you see security and privacy now scroll down until you see privacy controls click on that and then scroll down until you see ads so you want to tap on that once that opens up you'll see two option reset advertising ID and delete advertising ID let's start with delete advertising ID

6:12 you can read all about it and what it does and how it actually gets used and just press delete advertising ID now once that's done go one step back and press on reset advertising ID re replaces the advertising ID with a new random number I like to do this every once in a while okay moving along to the iOS fun go into settings scroll down until you see privacy and security but on that screen at the very top you're going to click on tracking and what you want to do is disable the option to allow apps to request to track you want to switch that off now once you're there go one step back now scroll all the way down until you see apple advertising and here too I like to disable personalize

7:00 ads now you can of course install an ad blocker on your phone and whilst you add it you might as well install one on your computer you should also be very aware that when you install apps just be aware of what information and what permission you're actually giving these apps I mean does a chess app really need to know your location yeah I I don't think so and of course uh use delete me to get your information removed from these data broker websites now if you want to see a full list of the 12,000 apps the were impacted check out the link in the description of the Google Docs that wired actually put together and check out this video right over here where I show you just how much your phone is communicating with various servers without your knowledge give the video a

7:46 quick thumbs up before you head out and I'm going to see you in this video Let's Go