Spying Apps

The dangers of a society where everything is watching you.

In Canada, Tim Hortons is everywhere. With 4,300 branches, it is roughly three times more numerous than McDonald’s. Eighty percent of Canadians stop by at least once a month. And Tim Hortons is watching.

Six million Canadians, out of an adult population of 31 million, use the Tim Hortons app to order their drinks. One of those was the Financial Post’s James McLeod, who noticed the app tracking his location and filed a freedom of information request to learn more. “From my home to my office to a Blue Jays game at Rogers Center, even all the way to Morocco, where I traveled on vacation last June, the company’s app silently logged my coordinates and relayed them back to its corporate servers,” wrote McLeod. Based on this data, Tim Hortons figured out where McLeod lived.

Read more at “Is Your Coffee Spying on You?”