Happy Data Privacy Week from Apple

"Data gathered from smartphones enables service providers to infer a wide range of personal information about their users, such as their traits, their personality, and their demographics. This personal information can be made available to third parties, such as advertisers, sometimes unbeknownst to the users. Leveraging location information, advertisers can serve ads micro-targeted to users based on the places they visited. Understanding the types of information that can be extracted from location data and implications in terms of user privacy is of critical importance,"

"Our own information - from the everyday to the deeply personal - is being weaponized against us with military efficiency, he said. These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded and sold. Taken to the extreme, this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm."

Data gathered from smartphones enables service providers to infer a wide range of personal information, including traits, personality, and demographics. Such personal information can be shared with third parties, including advertisers, sometimes without user knowledge. Leveraging location information, advertisers can serve micro-targeted ads based on places users visited. Law enforcement and government agencies can use location surveillance tools to track mobile devices. Platform-level privacy protections, such as network privacy improvements, aim to limit such tracking. Aggregated fragments of personal data are assembled and traded into enduring digital profiles that can drive algorithmic content delivery and amplify extreme or harmful content.

Read at Computerworld