![]() ![]() ![]() Tom's Guide had a look at the smallest sample of the scraped LinkedIn data, the only sample size that didn't require registration with a dodgy website. If anyone whose home address could be located with this data also happened to provide their date of birth along with the required full name, then an identity thief could try to use those three pieces of information to fraudulently open accounts in that person's name. It means you or I could drive to those houses, pound on the doors and ask for the residents by name - all because of data that was publicly accessible on LinkedIn. Names were attached to each of those listings. Individual houses were singled out and visible in Google Street View and the houses' full addresses displayed. ![]() More alarmingly, we found coordinates that zeroed in on specific addresses in the Boston suburbs and in a small town in Wisconsin. We found locations in New York City and Brazil, on the side of a road in rural France and in various cities in India. The geographic coordinates were pretty easy to translate into map locations by copying and pasting the coordinates into Google. It may be that those users used the LinkedIn mobile app and were not aware that the app could have grabbed their GPS data at the moment and uploaded it to LinkedIn servers. However, quite a few entries contained specific geographic coordinates, certainly many more than had provided email addresses or phone numbers. In iOS, you can do the same by going to Settings > Privacy > Location Services. In Android, go to Settings > Apps & notifications > App permissions > Location and determine which apps should always, should only sometimes or should never have access to your location. You can avoid being swept up in the next data scrape by providing only the minimum amount of information required to maintain a LinkedIn account, or in fact any social-media account.Īlso be sure to go into your phone's settings and deny social-media apps access to your GPS coordinates. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |