A lot of press has come out recently about smartphones being able to track your position, even when you don’t want them to. We understand your concern and this is an interesting issue when using Android and iPhones.
The only time that the What’s Invasive apps will save your position and send it to our server is when you push the button to collect a weed or pest location. The app does not transmit your location continuously or is able to track your movements.
After you have pushed the button and collected the weed or pest location, on the iPhone you must then upload this information that you just collected by going to the Upload tab and manually initiating a data transfer. Any location data that you collected can also be deleted from the Upload queue before sending other weed locations to the server.
On the Android, the observation will be uploaded automatically after one minute — however, you can delete any observations before they get uploaded and you can also turn this feature off in the Settings menu.
You might be able to get a “trace” of your location if you repeatedly push the “collect” button while you are moving, but that still requires you to manually collect your location — there is nothing automatic about sending your location to our server.
When the app is on, the GPS is turned on, so the phone itself “knows” your location. But those data are not transmitted anywhere until you take action and collect a weed or pest data point and then manually upload that point or have the Android upload it after one minute to allow you to change your mind.
As an additional layer of security, you should always choose a username that does not expose you or any personal information about you. All data collected by everyone in the What’s Invasive! system is publicly available for download and within those data we DO associate your weed and pest location measurements with your username.
However, if your username is “secure” then no one will be able to connect you to your username. We do NOT associate your real name with the data you collected, only your username and we do not collect the UDID number associated with your particular phone.
There is also no requirement that you provide your real name when signing up (we currently do not even check for a valid email, although you might still want to provide an email contact in case we need to send you update information — we don’t do this regularly and have only done it once in two years).
I hope that this information about how the system works allows you to choose how and when you want to participate in collecting weed and pest information. We hope that the levels of security that we have instated are sufficient, but if you have any other suggestions or concerns, please let us know!
- Eric