Beware of sharing your location in real-time, CNIL urges

The Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), the French data protection authority (DPA), is warning people not to carelessly share their location in real-time with others, even with loved ones.

The locations you visit and the travels you make contain both personal and sensitive information that might be interesting for data brokers and advertisers. They give us insights into your interests, political beliefs, religion, sexuality, health, leisure time, and so on.

This data may be exploited by the applications themselves and their partners without your knowledge, the French DPA claims.

“By providing access to your location in real-time, you also allow the application you use to collect, analyze, and sometimes transmit this information to third parties, like data brokers. This very precise data is valuable, particularly for targeted advertising. Your location data could then be found and put on sale on marketplaces,” the CNIL says in a press release that was published on Wednesday.

Besides creating and selling highly detailed user profiles to offer personalized ads, there’s another major risk when sharing your location in real-time with friends and family. It may lead to gradually accepting daily surveillance.

“It may seem reassuring to follow the position of a loved one. But this practice can quickly become intrusive, even burdensome for the person concerned. This implicit pressure sometimes makes it difficult to regain control over your location data,” the privacy supervisor suggests.

There are practical alternatives without resorting to real-time surveillance. The CNIL shares several tips to protect your privacy without constantly spying on someone’s location. For starters, people should talk about the potential risks of real-time location sharing and think about alternatives, like staying in touch by phone or setting return times.

Secondly, people can opt for a location app that doesn’t resell their data.

It’s also recommended to only share location data when necessary, to only give trusted individuals access to your location, to regularly check who can see your location, and to delete your location history.