CVS Responds: Fake News!

Published by Serge Egelman on

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As a followup to my previous post, I both emailed CVS and tweeted at them to give them an opportunity to comment on their app’s location-sharing practices:

I noticed that your mobile app appears to be sharing my location data with around 40 different third parties. Can you please explain this? Is this a bug?

They responded 5 hours later, claiming that they do not
share location data with any third parties:

…we do not share your location or information with any third parties. You may however, if you are not using our app turn off the locations [sic].

This is empirically false. (They also claim that I can turn off location-sharing, but only if I’m not using their app. I can only assume that’s a typo, rather than a statement that their app users cannot opt out of location-sharing.)

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Serge Egelman

Dr. Serge Egelman is the CTO and Co-Founder of AppCensus, the commercialization of his research at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). Dr. Egelman is also the Research Director of the Usable Security and Privacy group at ICSI, an independent research institute affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley.