triplanedave
New
United States
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In general, when you install apps on your phone, or when you initially set up your phone, you opt into (or specifically don't opt-out of) various technologies that know and share your phone's location. The phone hardware (find my phone/or the equivalent location finding tech on Android) or an installed app may share that data with other apps, or only with the service that enables that app. Either way, services that know where you are in the world rely on your location sharing consent (e.g. opt-in) as well as using signals from your phone to notify you. Take the coffee shop visit example. If you used their in-shop wifi on your phone, and you also separately granted the coffee shop app permission to do "things" on your phone (you did read the full terms of use, didn't you?) then, the app could detect when the coffee shop wifi is no longer in range of your phone, and pop up a notification offering you a 5% discount on your next order. Your wifi has a specific "serial number" (MAC address) so the next time you're in that coffee shop (or another location for the same coffee shop company), voila! they know you're there, and when you leave. If your wifi is on, you're publicly broadcasting your general (not GPS or triangulated) location to everyone around you. Got Bluetooth on for your headphones / earbuds? That has a serial number (MAC address) that you're publicly broadcasting too. How is all this broadcasting actually useful to you? ATM card skimmers use Bluetooth, and there are apps that know the signature of ATM skimmers, so you can install an app on your phone that captures all the Bluetooth signals while your'e at the gas station (or wherever) and tell you if any are from ATM card skimmers. Data sharing for the win. That said, if you're still not happy about all this data and location sharing, for all the non-DJI apps/services that bug you about location awareness, you can turn off all the location sharing permissions for all your apps and in general for the phone (e.g. "on-device sharing" in Settings). As to DJI knowing the drone and pilot location, I am mixed on this point. I don't want to interfere with local SAR, or interfere with otherwise legal and important ground or air operations. However, I do want control of when and where (to whom) any of that data goes. It sounds like user consent & control of location sharing might not be optional in the future for drone flying. |
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