Harmeet Dhillon Appears on Fox News’ ‘The Evening Edit’ To Discuss Chinese Weather App Collecting User Locations, Email Addresses
According to Dhillon:
I’m not surprised to see the story. Your viewers may recall the Chinese government requires companies who operate there to share information with the Chinese government. So basically, apps that are harvesting data from United State, including your email and identification of your phone, there is a good chance that data will be shared with the Chinese government. That’s probably information you don’t want out there. That’s more troubling and more troubling is that in third world countries, users of the low-cost Alcatel phones were being signed up automatically for a virtual reality game that could have cost $1.5 billion to those users if people hadn’t caught that and blocked it from happening. Users need to be very alert whenever they give their data. People click and sign, sure, track me without thinking what’s going to happen to their data.
Harmeet Dhillon Appears on Fox News’ ‘The Evening Edit’ To Discuss Chinese Weather App Collecting User Locations, Email Ad from Harmeet Dhillon on Vimeo.
The good part is apparently this is only happening to people who use these particular phones. It was only happening in third world countries. People are less sophisticated about giving their data and what’s going to happen, but it could happen here because a lot of American consumers are pretty unsophisticated about giving their data as well.
iPhone generally doesn’t give user data to Facebook. It’s a device you are paying a lot of money for. Whereas android devices are data harvesting devices that are licensed by Google. Their purpose is to collect your data. Somebody wants to make money off of it. Clearly, data is being shared with Facebook, with Google, and they operate digital advertising. These companies are making money by targeting ads to people. They need data to do that and it’s disturbing that it’s happening in this way. In Europe, consumers are typically notified about these sort of things, but in United States because successful lobbying of big tech companies and frankly lack of concern about privacy by our legislators in Washington, nothing is done to protect consumers. Consumers are really exposed. We all had phone calls and ads targeted towards us and we wonder, how did that happen? It’s because somebody, probably without your consent, got your data and it’s using it against you.
