Privacy in the digital age is becoming harder and harder to come by. An alarming new report about Waze, a popular navigation app for smartphones, makes this even clearer.
According to researchers at UCSB, hackers have the potential not only to push fake data to the app itself, showing phony car accidents and traffic jams, but they can even track users’ whereabouts in real-time. The report highlights the dangers of “crowd-sourced” projects such as Waze, which relies on user-supplied information.
Gang Wang — a computer science PhD candidate at UCSB — worked on the report. In a phone interview with The Santa Barbara Independent, Wang said it hasn’t stopped him from using the app. But after using it for a while, he “realized this kind of social feature...can reveal a lot of private information.”