How political campaigns, bosses are tracking your every move
Every step you take, your boss and political campaigns are watching you.
“We’re being watched, listened to, recorded all the time,” Lifewire.com’s Lance Ulanoff told FOX Business’, Maria Bartiromo.
Political campaigns are getting in on the action by working with third-party companies to track the “unique identifier” of voters’ phones, matching that ID with the “trove of data usually connected to that same ID.” From there, Ulanoff said, the campaign will recognize the phone, knowing where it has been and the interest of its user, creating a portrait of the user.
With this broad body of information, campaigns can effectively target potential voters with advertising, call, and send campaign representatives right to your house, Bartiromo noted.
Additionally, companies are taking advantage of this technology to get to know more about their employees.
Bosses "want to know when did you come into work? When did you leave? Are you happy at work?” Ulanoff said. “At the furthest end of it, if you have a corporate device, they might be using your webcam to track your facial expressions to know if you’re frustrated or upset at work.”
There are, however, measures that can be taken to lessen the intrusion of companies and campaigns into one’s personal life, like turning off the phone's location settings in each app, Ulanoff said. The newest iteration of Apple’s iOS operating system helps with this by sending a notification if an app that is not in use has been tracking the phone’s location.
Americans can be open to data theft if they do not set up their privacy settings properly. Ulanoff argued that “if your phone is unlocked and you’re not setting up any of your privacy settings, or locking it down, or doing pin codes, or doing things like two-factor authentication with your social media” one can be left open to data theft.
Ulanoff also pointed out that when using work devices, messaging on apps like Slack can be tracked by the employer to give “companies an idea of the overall feeling of…people in their company.”
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