The State of Illinois wants to ban geolocation tracking on users without permission

The Geolocation Privacy Protection Act (HB3449), was enacted in both houses of the state government last week. It’s now on the desk of Governor Bruce Rauner, ready to be approved into law.

The bill will make it unlawful for a company to trace a person’s geolocation outwardly first getting permission. It sets illegal penalties and damages of at least $1,000, plus attorney’s fees and court expenses, for working out a person’s whereabouts from their phone without permission.

From the bill’s full text:

‘Geolocation information’ denotes information that: (i) is not the contents of a message; (ii) is generated by or acquired from, in whole or in part, the evolution of a mobile device, including, but not limited to, a smartphone, tablet, or laptop computer; and (iii) is sufficient to conclude or infer the precise location of that device.

IP addresses aren’t included in the bill. It also introduces exceptions for locating a missing child or to allow emergency responders to locate somebody. Breaking the current law will be considered a breach of the Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act.

• Apple got hit with a class-action suit a few years back over spying users without consent, probably using the location service function on its iPhones to trace users, record their location, send it to Apple, and potentially give it to third parties.
• Researchers in 2014 published that when WhatsApp gave their location, the app “called out” to Google Maps without utilizing Secure HTTP, better known as HTTPS. WhatsApp thankfully corrected that glitch, given that enemies who can sniff network traffic between your phone and Google’s servers could have pinpointed users as soon as they gave the location with other WhatsApp users.
• News found out in September that Google Play trails you even if other apps don’t, given that there’s no per-app choice. It can simply be denied access to your location data if you turn position collection off entirely, different apps such as Google Chrome or Sophos Mobile Security, where the per-app toggle runs as expected.

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