Nice helmet!

leave the phone at home/powered off & just use a bicycle computer to do the computing.

Yet another thing for some to worry about.

Kids today have it rough. When I was young and breaking the law, we didn’t have cell phones.

Turn it Off or put the phone in a Faraday Box.

In my case the phone is not connected to a phone network, but is my GPS tracker and cycling computer .... turning it off and/or putting it in a Faraday box would be counter-productive. When I was young and doing things I will not confess to publicly, we didn't have computers .... NASA barely had computers.

Back in the day, we were smart enough not to confess in public. Now these idiots brag about their crimes on Facebook. Stupidity should be a felony ....

I don't own an smartphone or GPS, nor have a Google account. But they can still track me some other way I guess.

I have to admit I would like this multiple times if I could.

Even without apps on an older flip phone you could use cell tower triangulation to establish a users phone's presence to a given area. Phone location tracking has caused many a question in marriages also, :lol:

For many, even if they never get the Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame, their internet data will live forever. Social media research is a big business for employee hiring consultants.

Skynet?

I work somewhere “sensitive”. I don’t do the cool **** I’m blue collar support...background type worker.

There were a couple of contractors working in our scif and we were all talking about this type of stuff (big brother, tracking, social media, etc.). This guy starts talking about how he doesn’t have FB or a google account, Won’t bank online blah blah blah.

I stared at him like a cow staring at a fence post. I pointed to his badge. How’d you get in here? .gov knows more about you than your own family!

I’m toast. Got my DNA, blood, medical and financial history, know my every move. Tracking my bike rides are the least of my worries. Now standby while I go tweet about “restorative justice” and update my LinkedIn.

Is the problem only with Google phones? I'd expect its there for Apple phones as well.

It's all of your smart phones, it's not just google tracking you, your cell carrier is also tracking and selling the data.

A couple months ago, I was looking for a new bike computer did a 1 google search in the morning before work, by the time I got to work I was receiving ads for wahoo bike computers.

Oh darn, he's on to us!

Sure. Traffic cameras.

We had GPS back in the 1970s..."Geriatric Porch Sitters." Also known to alert police to neighborhood activities they found suspicious, whether they were nefarious or not.

Big government at work. If you carry a phone, turn it off, and only turn it on when you want to use it.

I think the solution for the guy who got tracked 3 times past a house that had been robbed, is “Alexa, I’m going for a bike ride, any location I should avoid ?”.

Next week there will be a news story about a guy who falls down an embankment while cycling only to be saved because they could track him via cell phone...

Everyone worries they can't be tracked like him :bike2:

They'd have to serve a warrant on your cell service provider, if you have an old flip-phone. That's a little tougher though because cell service has been around long enough for legislation to protect us, at least to some degree.

Not to be snarky, but technically if you give out any protected PII on a public website, you are waving the right to privacy for that specific data. As long as the business using it can reference the disclosure. IANAL but I'd guess that posting anonymously doesn't rise to that standard so you'd likely be OK. Advise caution though.

Apple iphone apps also track you and the information is sold to commercial interests.

The problem is like with this guy in the article, where an investigator who doesn't know what he's doing casts a large net - just because he can - and causes trouble for someone who happened to be randomly in the area.

In this case, more data is probably better than less. Instead of wasting his parent's retirement money on legal action, just providing his Strava tracks would have resolved the issue immediately. If he wasn't too paranoid to use Strava that is.

It's worse than that. A couple weeks ago, I was in Home Depot looking at sinks and faucets, and grabbed photos (with my iPhone) of the placards (with their UPCs) so I could remember the ones I liked. Within a couple hours, my social media feeds (instagram, for instance) started showing Home Depot ads for the same products. Asked my IT guy at work about it, and he said "Oh, sure, they're using your photos."

And don't even get me started on Amazon Echo devices. We've got one right next to our bed, if you get me. It's always listening.

it may be filming as well ..... :D