By now, the personal data collected and sold to third parties by practically all applications can be used as a weapon, a scenario envisaged for many years that is now a reality.
This was stated by several experts to the Washington Post after the case of the American bishop Jeffrey Burrill, forced to resign after a newspaper discovered, on the basis of the theoretically anonymous data of an app, the frequentation of some gay bars.
"It is the first time that I know of that a journalistic entity tracks a specific person and uses the information collected as a weapon - says Bennett Cyphers, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, active on digital rights -.
This is exactly the kind of privacy threat we have described for years ": Apps collect data such as age, gender, GPS-derived movements or browser usage habits, which are then sold to third parties who use them for commercial messages. , market surveys or researches. In theory, the most sensitive data, such as the name, are deleted, but a research already in 2013 showed that it was enough to cross four of those that are transmitted, for example age, sex, code. address of the residence, able to uniquely identify 95% of users. "Consumers do not have many tools to defend themselves - says Serge Egelman of the International Computer Science Institute -. Once the data leaves the device there is no way of knowing what will happen, who will receive it.There is no awareness of how they will be used ". (ANSA).
