While you’re sleeping, your iPhone stays busy harvesting data

WASHINGTON (WASHINGTON POST) – It’s 3am. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?

Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I’m snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I’ve never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same – and Apple could be doing more to stop it. 

On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11.43pm, a company called Amplitude learnt my phone number, e-mail and exact location. At 3.58am, another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6.25am, a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.

And all night long, there was some startling behaviour by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address – once every five minutes.

Our data has a secret life in many of the devices we use every day, from talking Alexa speakers to smart TVs. But we’ve got a giant blind spot when it comes to the data companies probing our phones.

You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad: “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.”