Double-double tracking: How Tim Hortons knows where you sleep, work and vacation

guest · Jun 12, 2020

Double-double tracking: How Tim Hortons knows where you sleep, work and vacation
June 12, 2020
https://business.financialpost.com/technology/tim-hortons-app-tracking-customers-intimate-data

I never would have consciously volunteered my home address, work location and vacation plans to Tim Hortons, but the company found out anyway.

For more than a year, the coffee chain has been tracking the movements of customers in exacting detail through its mobile ordering app.
From my home to my office to a Blue Jays game at Rogers Centre, even all the way to Morocco, where I travelled on vacation last June, the company’s app silently logged my coordinates and relayed them back to its corporate servers.

Within the Tim Hortons app, an FAQ covering privacy issues told customers that it tracks location “only when you have the app open,” but that did not appear to be entirely true based on the data RBI provided to me.
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I had no idea how extensive the tracking data was until I saw it. There were readings taken at all hours of the day and night, and RBI kept tabs on me every time the app thought I was visiting one of its competitors.
The data also indicate that Tims is using a location-tracking service from a company called Radar Labs Inc. that claims on its website to ping phones carrying its technology as often as every three to five minutes.

“It’s not a location-specific thing,” he added when asked why the app tracked me to Morocco. “It’s the permission that you allowed when you sign up for the app, and that you confirm on your phone.”
Fulton said customer location data is typically kept for 12 months, and the company has safeguards in place so that not all employees can access detailed customer location information.
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Brummelchen · Jun 13, 2020

i wonder what the article is about:
Code:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=digital.rbi.timhortons

guest · Jun 18, 2020

Privacy watchdogs taking a look at Tim Hortons app's location tracking technology
June 18, 2020
https://business.financialpost.com/...tim-hortons-apps-location-tracking-technology

Multiple watchdog agencies including the federal privacy commissioner say they’re now looking at the Tim Hortons app’s use of location tracking technology.

Last week, the Financial Post reported the Tim’s app uses technology from Radar Labs, an American company that states on its website that it can check a phone’s location in the background as often as every three to five minutes.
The Tim Hortons app does not disclose that it’s doing this level of tracking, though it states it may use location “to provide tailored offers and choices … [...]
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In response to inquiries from the Financial Post, privacy commissioners’ offices at the federal level and in British Columbia said they’re looking into the Tim Hortons app. Quebec’s privacy commissioner also said it is concerned about the issue and analyzing the situation.

“What we can say is that this raises serious concerns and we will be contacting Tim Hortons,” a spokesperson for federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien said in an email.
Two lawyers who spoke to the Financial Post said the law is pretty clear on collecting personal data in Canada, and simply asking for location permission isn’t enough to get consent.
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Fraser said that granting an app permission to access the GPS device on a user’s phone is not the same as consenting to location tracking.
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guest · Aug 22, 2020

Canada's privacy laws have 'no teeth': What I learned during an eight-month investigation into Tim Hortons' data tracking
Systems are built to frustrate transparency, and companies don't face any real penalties when they ignore the law
August 23, 2020
https://financialpost.com/technolog...rts/wcm/3de6c15b-24da-451d-a2d5-ae1cbf44f322/

I had been impatiently waiting for a particular email to arrive for two months before it finally hit my inbox last week. I was hoping to learn something new about Tim Hortons’ location surveillance efforts by asking one of its technology partners what it had about me.

Back in June, I’d reported that the coffee chain had been tracking me and countless other customers through its mobile ordering app.
Instead, Tim Hortons’ parent company, Restaurant Brands International Inc., contracted that work out to New York-based Radar Labs Inc.
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The much more important conclusion to come out of the whole process of trying to find out what data a particular company had on me is that Canada’s Personal Information and Protection of Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) is fundamentally flawed.

“Reputational harm is currently the bigger risk, as opposed to pure legal risk,” University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist said when I interviewed him about PIPEDA in July. “The law itself doesn’t have enough teeth.”
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As a result of my investigation, Tim Hortons has already taken the public relations hit about its location-tracking practices, and the privacy commissioner has now launched its own probe.

There is no evidence to suggest that Radar or Tim Hortons engage in such practices, and I’m not suggesting they do. But until I requested my data from Tim Hortons, I had no idea that Radar Labs even held any data on me, because the app and the privacy policy don’t reveal which third-party service providers Tim Hortons uses.
The point is that technology companies design their services in ways that make it impossible for a user to know what’s really going on behind the scenes.
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