Technology

A group of security researchers say dozens of popular iPhone apps are quietly sharing the location data of &tens of millions of mobile devices& with third-party data monetization firms.

Almost all require access to a userlocation data to work properly, like weather and fitness apps, but share that data often as a way to generate revenue for free-to-download apps.

In many cases, the apps send precise locations and other sensitive, identifiable data &at all times, constantly,& and often with &little to no mention& that location data will be shared with third-parties, say security researchers at the GuardianApp project.

&I believe people should be able to use any app they wish on their phone without fear that granting access to sensitive data may mean that this data will be quietly sent off to some entity who they do not know and do not have any desire to do business with,& said Will Strafach, one of the researchers.

Using tools to monitor network traffic, the researchers found 24 popular iPhone apps that were collecting location data — like Bluetooth beacons to Wi-Fi network names — to know where a person is and where they visit. These data monetization firms also collect other device data from the accelerometer, battery charge status and cell network names.

In exchange for data, often these data firms pay app developers to collect data and grow their databases and often to deliver ads based on a personlocation history.

But although many claim they don&t collect personally identifiable information, Strafach said that latitude and longitude coordinates can pin a person to a house or their work.

To name a few:

ASKfm, a teen-focused anonymous question-and-answer app, has 1,400 ratings on the Apple App Store and touts tens of millions of users. It asks for access to a userlocation that &won&t be shared with anyone.& But the app sends that location data to two data firms, AreaMetrics and Huq. When reached, the app maker said it believes its location collection practices &fit industry standards, and are therefore acceptable for our users.&

NOAA Weather Radar has more than 266,000 reviews and has millions of downloads. Access to your location &is used to provide weather info.& But an earlier version of the app from March was sending location data to three firms, Factual, Sense360 and Teemo. The code has since been removed. A spokesperson for Apalon, which built the app, said it &conducted a limited, brief test with a few of these providers& earlier this year.

Homes.com is a popular app that asks that you switch on your location to help &find nearby homes.& But the code, thought to be old code, still sends precise coordinates to AreaMetrics. The app maker said it used AreaMetrics &for a short period& last year but said the code was deactivated.

Perfect365, an augmented reality beauty app with more than 100 million users, asks for location to &customize your experience based on your location and more,& and refers users to the privacy policy for more — which does state that location data will be used for advertising. The app was briefly pulled after a BuzzFeed News story earlier this year outed the researchers, but returned to the app store days later. The current app version contains code for eight separate data monetization firms in the latest version of the app. The app maker did not return a request for comment.

And the list goes on — including more than a hundred Sinclair-owned local news and weather apps, which share location data with Reveal, a data tracking and monetization firm, which the company sayswill help the media giant bolster its sales by &providing advertisers with target audiences.&

That can quickly become a lucrative business for developers with popular apps and monetization firms alike, some of which collect billions of locations each day.

Most of the data monetization firms deny any wrongdoing and say that users can opt out at any time. Most said that they demand that app makers explicitly state that they require app developers to explicitly state that they are collecting and sending data to third-party firms.

The teamresearch shows that those requirements are almost never verified.

Reveal said it requires customers &state the use cases for location data in their privacy policy& and that users can opt-out at any time. Huq, like Reveal, said it carries out ®ular checks on our partner apps to ensure that they have implemented& measures that explain the companyservices. AreaMetrics, which collects primarily Bluetooth beacon data from public areas like coffee shops and retail stores, says it has &no interest& in receiving personal data from users.

Sense360 said the data it collects is anonymous and requires apps to get explicit consent from its users, but Strafach said few apps heseen contained text that sought assurances. But the company did not answer a specific question why it no longer works with certain apps. Wireless Registry said it also requires apps seek consent from users, but would not comment on the security measures it uses to ensure user privacy. And in remarks, inMarket said it follows advertising standards and guidelines.

Cuebiq claims to use an &advanced cryptography method& to store and transmit data, but Strafach said he found &no evidence& that any data was scrambled. It says itnot a &tracker& but says while some app developers look to monetize users& data, most are said to use it for insights. And, Factual said it uses location data for advertising and analytics, but must obtain in-app consent from users.

When reached, Teemo did not answer our questions. SafeGraph, Mobiquity and Fysical did not respond to requests for comment.

&None of these companies appear to be legally accountable for their claims and practices, instead there is some sort of self-regulation they claim to enforce,& said Strafach.

He said there isn&t much users can do, but limiting ad tracking in your iPhoneprivacy settings can make it more difficult for location trackers to identify users.

Applecrackdown on apps that don&t have privacy policies kicks in next month. But given how few people read them in the first place, don&t expect apps to change their behavior any time soon.

Quantum computing has moved out of the realm of theoretical physics and into the real world, but its potential and promise are still years away.

Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, a powerhouse in the world of quantum research and a young upstart in the field presented visions for the future of the industry that illustrated both how far the industry has come and how far the technology has to go.

For both Dario Gil, the chief operating officer of IBM Research and the companyvice president of artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and Chad Rigetti, a former IBM researcher who founded Rigetti Computing and serves as its chief executive, the moment that a quantum computer will be able to perform operations better than a classical computer is only three years away.

&[It&s] generating a solution that is better, faster or cheaper than you can do otherwise,& said Rigetti.&Quantum computing has moved out of a field of research into now an engineering discipline and an engineering enterprise.&

Considering the more than 30 years that IBM has been researching the technology and the millions (or billions) that have been poured into developing it, even seeing an end of the road is a victory for researchers and technologists.

Achieving this goal, for all of the brainpower and research hours that have gone into it, is hardly academic.

The Chinese government is building a $10 billion National Laboratory for Quantum Information in Anhui province, which borders Shanghai and is slated to open in 2020. Meanwhile, the U.S. public research into quantum computing is running at around $200 million per year.

Source: Patin Informatics via Bloomberg News.

One of the reasons why governments, especially, are so interested in the technology is its potential to completely remake the cybersecurity landscape. Some technologists argue that quantum computers will have the potential to crack any type of encryption technology, opening up all of the networks in the world to potential hacking.

Of course, quantum computing is so much more than security. It will enable new ways of doing things we can&t even imagine because we have never had this much pure compute power. Think about artificial and machine learning or drug development; any type of operation that is compute-intensive could benefit from the exponential increase in compute power that quantum computing will bring.

Security may be the Holy Grail for governments, but both Rigetti and Gil say that the industrial chemical business will be the first place where the potentially radical transformation of a market will appear first.

What is quantum computing anyway

To understand quantum computing it helps to understand the principles of the physics behind it.

As Gil explained onstage (and on our site), quantum computing depends on the principles of superposition, entanglement and interference.

Superposition is the notion that physicists can observe multiple potential states of a particle. &If you a flip a coin it is one or two states,& said Gil. Meaning that therea single outcome that can be observed. But if someone were to spin a coin, they&d see a number of potential outcomes.

Once you&ve got one particle thatbeing observed, you can add another and pair them thanks to a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. &If you have two coins where each one can be in superpositions and then you can have measurements can be taken& of the difference of both.

Finally, thereinterference, where the two particles can be manipulated by an outside force to change them and create different outcomes.

&In classical systems you have these bits of zeros and ones and the logical operations of the ands and the ors and the nots,& said Gil. &The classical computer is able to process the logical operations of bits expressed in zeros and ones.&

&In an algorithm you put the computer in a super positional state,& Gil continued. &You can take the amplitude and states and interfere them and the algorithm is the thing that interferes… I can have many, many states representing different pieces of information and then i can interfere with it to get these data.&

These operations are incredibly hard to sustain. In the early days of research into quantum computing the superconducting devices only had one nanosecond before a qubit transforms into a traditional bit of data. Those ranges have increased between 50 and 100 microseconds, which enabled IBM and Rigetti to open up their platforms to researchers and others to conduct experimentation (more on that later).

The physical quantum computer

As one can imagine, dealing with quantum particles is a delicate business. So the computing operations have to be carefully controlled.At the base of the machine is what basically amounts to a huge freezer that maintains a temperature in the device of 15 millikelvin — near absolute zero degrees and 180 times colder than the temperatures in interstellar space.

&These qubits are very delicate,& said Gil. &Anything from the outside world can couple to it and destroy its state and one way to protect it is to cool it.&

Wiring for the quantum computer is made of superconducting coaxial cables. The inputs to the computers are microwave pulses that manipulates the particles creating a signal that is then interpreted by the computers& operators.

Those operators used to require a degree in quantum physics. But both IBM and Rigetti have been working on developing tools that can enable a relative newbie to use the tech.

Quantum computing in the &cloud&

Even as companies like IBM and Rigetti bring the cost of quantum computing down from tens of millions of dollars to roughly $1 million to $2 million, these tools likely will never become commodity hardware that a consumer buys to use as a personal computer.

Rather, as with most other computing these days, quantum computing power will be provided as a service to users.

Indeed, Rigetti announced onstage a new hybrid computing platform that can provide computing services to help the industry both reach quantum advantage — that tipping point at which quantum is commercially viable — and to enable industries to explore the technologies to acclimatize to the potential ways in which typical operations could be disrupted by it.

&A user logs on to their own device and use our software development kit to write a quantum application,& said Rigetti. &That program is sent to a compiler and kicks off an optimization kit that runs on a quantum and classical computer… This is the architecture thatneeded to achieve quantum advantage.&

Both IBM and Rigetti — and a slew of other competitors — are preparing users for accessing quantum computing opportunities on the cloud.

IBM has more than a million chips performing millions of quantum operations requested by users in over 100 countries around the world.

&In a cloud-first era I&m not sure the economic forces will be there that will drive us to develop the miniaturized environment in the laptop,& Rigetti said. But the ramifications of the technologycommercialization will be felt by everyone, everywhere.

&Quantum computing is going to change the world and itall going to come in our lifetime, whether thattwo years or five years,& he said. &Quantum computing is going to redefine every industry and touch every market. Every major company will be involved in some capacity in that space.&

Peer into the future — or a future, at least. Having otherwise run out of things to improve on, Nokia brand licenser HMD is apparently bringing a five-camera phone to market (well, six, probably, if you count the other side). Because three or four would be taking the easy way out.

The leaked image of the upcoming phone lines up with sketches and a recentish patent from lens makers, Zeiss. The cameras are lined up in a circular array, along with the flash, leap frogging that new Huawei handset that settled at a mere three.

So, why five cameras The obvious answer is why not, because whatever, I guess. I mean, we only go around once of this crazy planet of ours once. The more specific answer is a bit more difficult to suss out the image alone, but going with that number is one way not to have to choose between things like zoom and a secondary monochrome.

As has been noted, Nokia (the actual Nokia, that is) had a history of innovating on the imaging front from that 41-megapixel to the stupidly expensive Ozo VR rig. So at very least, this could be nice little homage to the Nokia of yore. How you&ll actually hold the whole thing without touching the lenses every time, on the other hand, is another question entirely.