What Your Smartphone Is Telling the NSA About You

Leaky apps like “Angry Birds” are selling your personal profile

By Minhee Cho – ProPublica – Last week, documents unveiled by ProPublica, the New York Times and the Guardian showed that the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, are not only capable of accessing your metadata but also capturing information sent by applications on your smartphone.

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These “leaky apps” – which include Google Maps, Facebook and Angry Birds – are valuable tools in the NSA’s arsenal. They can reveal a smartphone user’s gender, income, location, political leanings and even whether that person is a “swinger,” according to secret British intelligence documents.

ProPublica’s Jeff Larson joins the podcast this week to explain how the NSA and GCHQ are accessing your personal data and how worried consumers should be about their privacy.