With all this talk about the NSA and government surveillance, its easy to forget that companies like Facebook track you as well. In fact, if you have Facebook Messenger installed on your smartphone, which hundreds of millions of people do, then the company is tracking pretty much every move you make, and its doing so without your knowledge or permission. 

Facebook Messenger is the single most popular app in the entire iTunes store. Millions of people now use it on their phones instead of SMS, which means that millions of people have been letting Facebook tap their exact locations whenever they chat. Who needs the NSA? Aran Khanna, an incoming Facebook intern (!), combed his Facebook Messenger account and was startled by how much exact GPS data the company had been recording without his knowledge: “You may not believe that there are enough of these location tagged messages to provide truly invasive data on any one person, since they must be on mobile, with GPS on, and choose to share their location for it to be sent… right What you should keep in mind is that the mobile app for Facebook Messenger defaults to sending a location with all messages.”