{"id":4511,"date":"2016-09-14T12:06:06","date_gmt":"2016-09-14T16:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncjolt.org\/?p=4511"},"modified":"2020-06-04T20:53:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T20:53:00","slug":"individual-privacy-challenges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/blogs\/individual-privacy-challenges\/","title":{"rendered":"Individual Privacy Challenges in the Smartphone Age: Commerce and Law Enforcement Implications"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let\u2019s face it.\u00a0 Your ability to function in today\u2019s digital economy, workplace, and world depends on your ability to access information quickly and from anywhere.\u00a0 The smartphone is the tool de jour for keeping up and staying informed, and digital trends say that our collective dependence on the smartphone will only increase.\u00a0 Today in America, more than 64 percent<\/a><\/span> of adults own a smartphone as opposed to 10 percent<\/a><\/span> in 2009, and now 72 percent<\/a><\/span> of children under the age of 8 have used a smartphone to connect online.
\nBut with each seemingly innocent use of a smartphone do we know what amount of control or personal privacy we surrender?\u00a0 The truth is that the answer is still to be determined.\u00a0 The rights and expectations of privacy in your everyday phone use are being decided by private companies, government agencies, and federal courts, and two significant events provide us the latest indicators of that struggle.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Government defends privacy rights: The FTC\u2019s InMobi Settlement<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The popularity and ubiquity of smartphone usage has fueled many companies\u2019 efforts to exploit the mobile platform to sell targeted products to consumers.\u00a0 Enter mobile ad network companies, such as InMobi, who make money by providing software that collects massive amounts of user data from mobile networks, including location, and matches targeted ads with websites and applications.
    \nBut InMobi went one step further, deciding to crowd-source its location information from consenting users to track users who specifically declined geolocation tracking and continued to provide targeted advertising based upon those inferred locations.\u00a0 Specifically, InMobi built a database with location information from consenting users and recorded those locations with the Base Service Set Identification (BSSID) addresses from Wi-fi access points those consenting users were utilizing.\u00a0 Then, when a user who did not consent to the use of their location accessed data through a recorded BSSID, InMobi used its database to infer the user\u2019s location and push location-specific advertisements even after the user never consenting to location tracking.\u00a0 The scale of this effort was also alarming, as InMobi     claims<\/a> <\/span>to reach more than 1.5 billion unique mobile devices worldwide, and is the first of such mobile ad networks to reach that number.
    \nMany smartphone applications utilized InMobi\u2019s software toolkit, including those applications specifically designed for children\u2019s use, which ran directly afoul of the Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Act. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) stepped in and, in its first action against a mobile ad network,     settled a suit<\/a><\/span> in June with InMobi, requiring the company to change their location tracking policies, pay $950,000 for their improper collection and use of the location of hundreds of millions of users without their consent, and delete all location data collected or inferred without consent.
    \nThe civil penalties the FTC dealt to InMobi put all other software developers and businesses on notice that trying to skirt around the express consent requirement to track geolocation data from smart phone users will not be tolerated in the U.S., and also highlighted the lack of security of BSSID information as it correlates to individual users.\u00a0 The settlement, although indicative of increased privacy protection to smartphone users, did not establish new case law or regulations.\u00a0 In fact, the law\u2019s current status as it pertains to cell phone, cell site, and wi-fi location privacy rights is less optimistic.<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Government attacks privacy rights: CSLI and the Fourth Circuit ruling in United States v. Graham<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      While June\u2019s FTC ruling reinforced some privacy expectations in smartphone users, a federal appeals court\u2019s en banc decision in May dealt privacy proponents another strong defeat in the cell phone arena.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      The Fourth Circuit, in United States v. Graham<\/em>, ruled 12-3<\/a> <\/span>that an individual does not have any expectation of privacy in their historical cell site location information (CSLI) that is delivered to a (third-party) cell phone service provider, and that the government can obtain the information without a warrant.\u00a0 The opinion clearly stated that it was bound by precedent from a 1979 Supreme Court case<\/a><\/span>.
      \nWhat is crucial about CSLI, is that your phone sends this information without       any action<\/a><\/span> on the part of the user.\u00a0 Because cell phones independently seek the closest cell tower and push data without request, this sharing of sensitive information is automatic between a cell phone user and the service provider.\u00a0 This type of information is also the most popular form of law enforcement cell phone surveillance \u2013 AT&T fielded more than 57,000<\/a><\/span> requests for such data last year alone.
      \nThis Fourth Circuit opinion marks the fourth time a court of appeals ruled in this way, presaging an appeal to the Supreme Court to resolve the       conflicting applications<\/a><\/span> of the third-party doctrine with regard to cell phone location information privacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Let\u2019s face it.\u00a0 Your ability to function in today\u2019s digital economy, workplace, and world depends on your ability to access information quickly and from anywhere.\u00a0 The smartphone is the tool de jour for keeping up and staying informed, and digital trends say that our collective dependence on the smartphone will only increase.\u00a0 Today in America, …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4507,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4511"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4511"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7192,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4511\/revisions\/7192"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}