The spy who lives in
Samantha Brett
AS I sat in my car after work the other day, my iPhone beeped with a peculiar notification. Before I even put the key into the ignition, it hummed again, telling me: “It will take you 23 minutes to drive home.”
Home? I hadn’t even fastened my seatbelt, when the gadget was already plotting the quickest route to my new apartment. But wait, how did it even know I was going home? And worse still, how the heck did it know where I lived?
A quick Google search discovered — shock, horror — that our phones have indeed been spying on us — with a relatively little known setting that surreptitiously slipped into our lives with the latest iPhone update. Known as “frequent locations”, every move you’ve recently made is followed, recorded and saved, including where you live, where you work, where you shop, where your kids go to school and how long you spent at pilates last week.
Apple claims the data is solely stored on your device, and that it will not be sent to anyone without your consent. But I don’t actually recall ever giving the company permission to know these things about me to begin with, let alone decide who they’ll share them with.
And it’s not just the iPhone that knows your private business. Google, Gmail and Facebook are (not surprisingly) tracking your every move, despite purporting otherwise.
Ever noticed that after doing a Google search on holiday destinations in Fiji, suddenly a barrage of advertisements for hotels in Fiji pop up like confetti as you log into Gmail account? And how those same advertisements follow you around like a bad smell as you log on to your Facebook page?
And speaking of Facebook, a female friend recently came across another, albeit more sinister alert from the social networking page. The notification asked her if she knew her boyfriend’s ex. How did Facebook make the connection? She was flummoxed.
After scouring the site’s help page, she worked out that apparently “Facebook suggestions” are made when someone is incessantly looking at your profile, or mentioning your full name in private messages to someone else.
“My boyfriend’s ex girlfriend has been caught stalking me,” the friend announced in shock. “Facebook is now ratting people out who are stalking others? But that’s the best part of the site!”
While complaints about Facebook’s alleged privacy issues are commonplace, there’s a more perilous issue at hand sparking worldwide headlines: the Medicare leak. While the federal government announced on Monday that it would be conducting a full-scale investigation into how all of our Medicare numbers came to be illegally for sale on the “dark web”, it’s caused many to ponder the interminable question: how safe are any of us? And how easy would it be for hackers to take over our identities, ruin our lives and shut down our entire worlds with one click of a mouse?
Some called the outrage over the Medicare debacle “fear mongering”; as many around the country responded that no-one would actually care about their last dental check-up, bout of tonsillitis or attack of the hives. But experts are quick to remind us that it’s the card numbers that pose the biggest threat — enabling hackers to steal your identity.
One female journalist in her 30s contacted me while I was researching this topic, to say she was recently the victim of identity fraud. She had mistakenly clicked on a rogue email, enabling hackers to have access to her entire life at