Communications of the ACM
Who Has Access to Your Smartphone Data?
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In a world that is defined by the generation and collection of data by technology and communications companies, personal information—including where people go, with whom they associate, what they purchase, and what they read, listen to, and even eat—it is quite a simple task to create a detailed profile of an individual based solely on the data captured in his or her phone.
The right to access and use the cache of personal information stored in each person's smartphone has become a major question about balancing personal privacy rights against governments' desire to monitor and retrieve data about its citizens' activities for law enforcement, public safety, and health issues. While much of the attention over the past several years has focused on demands from law enforcement to access this data to aid in criminal investigations, the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has refocused the debate on the government's right to access location data during health or other public safety emergencies.
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