Privacy Tools: Mask Your Location

In
the course of writing my book, Dragnet Nation,
I tried various strategies to protect my privacy. In this series of book
excerpts and adaptations, I distill the lessons from my privacy experiments
into tips for readers.

“Where
R U?” There’s a reason that is among the most common text messages of the
modern age.

Location
is one of the most revealing pieces of information about us. In 2013, researchers found
that four instances of a person’s location at a given point in time were enough
to uniquely identify 95 percent of the individuals they examined. “Human
mobility traces are highly unique,” the researchers wrote. “Mobility data is
among the most sensitive data currently being collected.”

Location
is also predictive. In another study,
researchers at Microsoft were able to use location data to predict where people
would be in the future. Wednesdays were the easiest to predict, and weekends
the hardest. “While your location in the distant future is in general highly
independent of your recent location,” the researchers wrote, “it is likely to
be a good predictor of your location exactly one week from now.”

To
mask my location I took several steps:

1) When browsing the Web, I tried to use the Tor Browser as often as possible. Tor
anonymizes the location — known as the IP
Address — that you computer transmits automatically to every website you
visit. It’s amazing to see how revealing your IP address can be
— this site pinpoints my location
exactly.

Tor bounces your Internet traffic around the world so that your computer’s location
is masked. However, because your traffic is bouncing around the world, using
Tor can slow down your Web browsing. Click the Tor button on this graphic to see how
Tor protects your location from potential eavesdroppers.

2) Masking my location when using my cellphone was more difficult. I
turned off ‘location services’ for my apps. And I tried to opt out from
companies that track cellphone users via the Wi-Fi signal emitted by their
phone.

I
identified 58 companies that appeared to be in the mobile location
tracking business — ranging from advertisers to wireless carriers. Of
those, only 11 offered opt-outs — which I attempted to complete. Here
is the chart of the folks I found that offered opt outs.

The
Future of Privacy Forum has also built a location opt-out site, which as of today, offers opt-outs from 11 location tracking companies.

Ultimately,
I decided that turning off my Wi-Fi signal was a more effective opt-out.

3) When I really do not want my location to be tracked, I
throw my phone into a Faraday cage — a bag that blocks it from
transmitting signals to Wi-Fi or the cellphone tower. I use this one from OffPocket, but
any Faraday cage will
do.

Of
course, this also means that I can’t use my phone. So, like most of my privacy
fixes, it is a highly imperfect solution.