Who is fishing whom….

We are living in the era of the Digital Cloud which is an integrated online platform than any other time in the history. We have different level of role and scopes to interact online via social media, email, blog portals or any other e-commerce transactions. We are conducting our business and infrastructure via complex data / Big Data driven channels and with different innovations. Thus our culture is adopting such fundamentally linked socialism to the real time goal of individual.

As we know within this social media trend each individual must have a facebook, twitter or Google etc. social account. As the world's most popular search engine, Google has created most enormous popular services like YouTube, Gmail, Google Map and much more ...with the integrated search service used by hundreds of millions of people.

Now a days we all are familiar and addicted with all the above services due to easy to use , deliver fast relevant results and are primary search destinations world wide. However, for global use, we concern privacy and especially in the realm of huge data storage, search tracking, and use of personal data cloud. Thus the vital concern of these social media sites, including Google have about the right to privacy and security for the amount of information that they are tracking, storing and ultimately using, are becoming increasingly important to many users.

First of all we should have to be aware about what type of Information and details these social media portals are tracking about you, how it uses these Information and how you can protect yourself not to be in sharing mode.

We know the Information / Content we are fishing about (Searching), is the King always - is the Vital marketing theory for most of the social media marketers. Content Fishing means to find out expected content or important public information from a sharing medium. You are standing in line at the grocery store or at a mall, so it seems like a decent time to scroll through Facebook.

But then you do it again while you are stuck in traffic driving those groceries home, and then again waiting on dinner to arrive. Before you know it, you can spend cumulative hours on social media over the course of the day, hours you âre never going to get back that could feasibly have spent, at least a few of them, doing something a little better. Over the past few months, a few of my friends have decided to delete Facebook and Twitter off their professional phones in an attempt to curb their social media use. It is a strategy that has helped them cut down on how much they use both, but it is also made them miss out on invites to events and other things because they âre not looking at it all. It would be better to find a medium of some sort. Enter Pyxsee. The app that can track your social media use and allows you to set limits on how long you spend places like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram each day.

Some time you need privacy and you probably don't want to broadcast about some facts which is happening most of the times or special to you, but a lot of social media tracking your location and making it easy for others to do the same. Facebook tracks the location of all of your messages, While it's pretty well known that Facebook's Messenger app uses location data, it's not so well known just how that location data can be used. But thanks to a new Google Chrome extension called Marauder's Map by which you can get some interesting creepy location data from the messaging app. It is also be noted that if someone with whom, you are messaging has their location data turned on, you can also see almost exactly where they are located by simply clicking on the icon next to the time you sent the message.

Instagram also playing the same role by collecting some attractive and valuable specific data about users' locations based on where they post images. While the picture sharing app does give users the option to name the location of where they are uploading or downloading an image, it also a geo-tag of an uploaded pic regardless if the user has selected the "Add to Photo Map" function.

This means that anybody can view the almost exact location of where an image was posted on a map even if the user doesn't select the "Name This Location" feature. This is scary because people tend to upload the most images from their home or other private places they frequent a lot, like work. So if a user's profile is public and their photo map is turned on, anybody can see the exact location of where they are posting. And even if a person's profile is private, but the photo map is enabled, their friends can see all of the location data for each image.

To verify or change your Instagram location settings, you will have to again change them under the privacy settings in your smartphone or smart device. But if you still want to geo-tag locations sometimes, you will need to keep the location setting turned on, but disable the "Add to Photo Map" feature in Instagram.

Foursquare's check-in app Swarm broadcasts users' almost exact location even if they have not selected a specific location for check-in, If a user has the 'Neighbourhood Sharing' feature is turned on in the app, their location down to the cross streets can be viewed by simply tapping the teardrop icon under their profile image.

Your smart-phone knows where you are at pretty much all times. This is no surprise that's part of the appeal. But while there are options to disable GPS and Location Services in the settings of Android phones, this won't stop Google from knowing where you are. Short of turning off your phone, there's actually no real way.

Now details about the length to which Google can tracks Android phones surfaced today from Quartz. =As per Report Android phones will track your location even if you disable location services and even if you aren't logged into the phone. How ???

The operating system automatically tracks the location of the cell towers it is connecting to and phones the information home to Google automatically, a policy which Google confirmed to Quartz.

As Quartz reports:

Even devices that had been reset to factory default settings and apps, with location services disabled, were observed by Quartz sending nearby cell-tower addresses to Google. Devices with a cellular data or WiFi connection appear to send the data to Google each time they come within range of a new cell tower. When Android devices are connected to a WiFi network, they will send the tower addresses to Google even if they don’t have SIM cards installed.

The practical effect of this is that, so long as your Android phone is on and not inside a Faraday cage, your location data is being communicated. Google told Quartz that this practice has existed for 11 months, but that the information was never stored or used and furthermore that the process will now be ended,While the practice is just generally alarming, it also can have profound legal implications. Loose restrictions allow law enforcement in many states to obtain cell tower location information without a warrant until an upcoming Supreme Court case will ultimately decide if this will remain legal. In the meantime, there's nothing much to do besides be aware of how much and how easily your phone may be tracking you. If you really need privacy, you'll just have to turn the thing all the way off.

If you like any of Google’s services, you âre expected to share your private data with Google which is mandatory. You get free access to browse things like Google Search, Gmail, Maps, and Android OS, and in return you let Google show you highly-tailored ads that are based on your incredibly complex Google profile. It’s a win-win situation if you will but that doesn’t change the fact that Google collects an incredible amount of data about you, especially from that device you use most, your Android phone. And it might all happen without your knowledge. As per a news Using three distinct Android phones, namely the Samsung Galaxy S8,Moto Z Droid, Google Pixel 2 and Quartz tracked all the data that leaves your phone to reach Google’s servers. The phones were not connected to a cellular network. Instead, they were hooked up to a portable Internet-connected Wi-Fi network able to eavesdrop on all the transmissions send and received by these phones.

Here is the kind of data your Android device transmits to Google on a regular basis:

- A list of types of movements that your phone thinks you could be doing, by likelihood. (e.g. walking: 51%, onBicycle: 4%, inRailVehicle: 3%)

- The barometric pressure whether or not you âre connected to wifi

- The MAC address ”which is a unique identifier of the Wi-Fi access point you are connected to

- The MAC address, signal strength, and frequency of every nearby wifi access point

- The MAC address, identifier, type, and two measures of signal strength of every nearby Bluetooth beacon

- The charge level of your phone battery and whether or not your phone is charging

- The voltage of your battery

- The GPS coordinates of your phone and the accuracy of those coordinates

- The GPS elevation and the accuracy of that

That is very disturbing considering that most people are actually unaware of it all, even if they all agreed to share Location History with Google. Because it appears that location tracking is actually the law-breaker here. As soon as you allow any Google-made app to record your location history — Google Maps is one likely candidate, but there are plenty of others âre all of Google’s Android apps will then grab that location data, not just the app asking permission to track you. Google did make Location History an opt-in program. But the implications of enabling Location History in a Google app aren’t clear to the user.

With your permission, Google uses your Location History to deliver better results and recommendations on Google products, Google told Quartz. For example, you can receive traffic predictions for your daily commute, view photos grouped by locations, see recommendations based on places you have visited, and even locate a missing phone. Location History is entirely opt-in, and you can always edit, delete, or turn it off at any time.

You can turn off Location History if you care about your privacy more than anything else, but that means not being able to use some apps that require access to your location???

Thus when we are fishing, fishing and fishing in this twenty-first century's agile digital cloud using smart mechanisms ... and we are finally tracked, recorded and shared by Social Merchants and are knowingly pissing up by default, owing to the loose restrictions allow law enforcement in many cases....and the hands on enforced privacy policy rules.

Tags: Who is fishing whom, Digital Cloud, e-commerce transactions, Big Data, Google Map, search engine, Facebook, Add to Photo Map, Name This Location, Foursquare, Neighbourhood Sharing, Swarm broadcasts users, Android phones,  WiFi network, MAC address, varindia