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Until retailers adopt “meaningful standards” of transparency, or offer consumers more clear choices to opt-out of such tracking, “consumers are better off shutting out this kind of tracking,” said Jim Brock, vice president of privacy products at AVG.Īndroid has a permission structure for determining how apps will use a person’s location data, but WiFi tracking allows a degree of circumvention around that framework, so that companies can compile a history of your movements in public places.

Till now PrivacyFix let users manage their privacy settings across various sites, but with the update it will now block Android smartphones from transmitting the unique code known as their MAC address, which allows retailers and advertisers to track the physical movements of shoppers in order to run tallies on visitor numbers or optimize their advertising. The update to AVG’s free app, being launched on Tuesday, is the first of its kind to be offered by an established security company and lets Android users block location tracking by Wi-Fi networks in retail stores or public venues. Now security firm AVG Technologies is challenging that business model with a free smartphone app that blocks WiFi location tracking, even borrowing the “Do Not Track” movement label to name the "DNT" feature it's adding to its PrivacyFix app for Android.

It’s well known that advertisers track our browsing histories on the web to better target us with ads, but they’re increasingly moving towards tracking our locations too, because the history of your physical movements can be just as valuable to an advertiser as your virtual ones.