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Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location


A hack of location data company Gravy Analytics has revealed which apps are—knowingly or not—being used to collect your information behind the scenes.

404 Media and a group of other outlets showed last year how that tool, made by a company called Babel Street, could be used to monitor visitors to out-of-state abortion clinics. He pointed out some of the user-agents in the file, which show how a user’s device connected to a service, referenced “afma-sdk.” That is a string used by Google’s Mobile Ads SDK(software development kit). Unacast, which merged with Gravy in 2023, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, both on the hack and whether it or any of its suppliers have derived location data from the real-time bidding process.

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