Animation and Apps That Track You

My Moovly Animation:

For this weeks animation I used the application Moovly. This was a free resource, with some animations already made, to insert into your own project. It was easy to navigate, as it does have a tutorial and pretty straight forward tools. The process was super easy, the only difficulty I had was figuring out how to export my finished animation. You have to exit the animation after hitting save and go back to your "My Projects" page, to then click on the project you want to download and export it wherever you choose. I decided to use the rotating earth and a background of some twinkling stars for this animation, which you can check out below!

Animation Link:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1D__3Q2N21CE1gmc7dPKqYsnE5pj77pdP/view?usp=sharing

Apps That Track You:

The article, "The Most Important Things to Know About Apps That Track Your Location", by Sidney Fussell highlights a lot of good points. From this reading I have learned a bit about data collection, sharing, and selling, as well as some information on privacy. When you allow location based services on your devices to access your location, you are sharing more information than you know. These services can overtime collect more information, based on your routines, the things you access online, etc., creating a larger profile on your personal information than you would guess is happening based on sharing your location to services as simple as even the weather app. 

This data can then be shared or sold to third-parties without your knowledge, in order to create advertisements or provide you with specific recommendations. This means the original service you shared your location with, can now collect extra information on you and then sell this information to other services. There can be a number of services with your information, without your knowledge or consent. These services can also grant law enforcement access to your information without you knowing. 

When you allow an app to have your location on the setting of "always" when prompted the question, you are allowing access to all of your whereabouts, and the personal information correlated. This is why it is important to limit or not allow access to location services as much as possible. When prompted to allow location sharing for different services, you should select "just this once" or "only while using app", limiting the services access to your constant location. In addition to this, you should occasionally check your settings to make sure only the necessarily location permissions are enabled.