Foursquare constantly tracking users' locations

The second portion of the post which explains how to capture traffic leaving your device is more informative and probably should have been the main thesis rather than focusing on Foursquare's non-surprising use of constant geo location updates.

It was enabled for me by default, but the iOS location icon is always displayed on the Springboard when it&#x27;s being used.<p>Also, Foursquare will constantly send you notifications saying &quot;It looks like you&#x27;re near Foobar, would you like to check in?&quot;. They make it very, very obvious that they&#x27;re tracking your location.<p>It was a quick matter of going into preferences and looking to see what applications used location services recently to fix things up. The biggest offenders were Foursquare and the Google app. I ended up turning Google off completely, and disabled Foursquare except for when I have the app open. Problem solved.

Is this not the entire point of Foursquare?

I wish there was an OS option that does the equivalent of &quot;Only permit location based service calls when app is open and active&quot;<p>I want the option of enabling Yelp only when I use Yelp etc.

A company focused on enabling users to report their own locations... knows the locations of their users.<p>I am not surprised.

BTW here is a nice project I came across that should do the same thing as Fiddler, but it&#x27;s for Linux rather than Windows:<p><a href="http://mitmproxy.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitmproxy.org&#x2F;</a><p>To decrypt HTTPS you follow the same procedure of installing a root certificate on your phone.

Because of this I assume companies will start encrypting their JSON to make it impossible to see what is going through their application. A lot of lawsuits can start from this kind of exploring.

The WiFi scan data is interesting. I guess Google maps cars have made it ok for corporations to War Drive at massive scale. But using your users devices to do it for you is interesting.

FWIW, in the IOS version of the app, the offending check box appears to be disabled by default.<p>(I certainly didn&#x27;t disable it, so I can only assume that&#x27;s the state from install).

I&#x27;m pretty sure there are a lot of apps that have similar behavior. I know at one time Twitter and Facebook did something similar.

I&#x27;m on an iPhone 5S and it significantly diminishes my working battery life unless I manually close the app.

Does this also work if the user has signed out of Foursquare? (on Android?)

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