This Wikipedia article has a few examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_re-identification
I suspect that all the news articles reporting on this issue are probably greatly misunderstanding how technology works.
> And all night long, there was some startling behavior by a household name: Yelp. It was receiving a message that included my IP address — once every five minutes. [1]
Literally any load balancer is going to know what IP address you're coming from. Having a website logging your IP address is not cause for alarm. A good mitigator for this probelm would be to disable background activity for Yelp or any other apps you feel do not need that sort of access.
The journalist also makes no attempt to explain what steps they took to attempt to change their Yelp account preferences. They did not inform us whether or not they were logged in or opted in or out of any particular preferences. That's what makes the story so unhelpful.
A more useful version of that article should be informing people to make a check on all their account preferences every time they sign up for a service. Usually, marketing and telemetry settings are on by default. I most definitely don't agree with this, but it's not unique to Yelp.
Perhaps you're also referring to a lawsuit in progress regarding the way in which Yelp transfers contacts? [2]
In this case, the arguments center around some rather nebulous contract law, in my layman's understanding of the case. Again, your OS already protects you - if you never grant an application access to your contacts, you never have to worry about the transmission of that data.
It should be smartphone 101 that allowing an application data access will allow it forever, because that's how iOS has worked since day one. Again, we need more protections in the form of laws, not just conventions, and I don't agree with the idea that data can be sent around willy nilly, but this is the reality baked in to all mobile applications. Once you give third party code access to your data in a rather explicit fashion, it's not in your control what's done with it.
So this still sounds bad, perhaps, but also, an iPhone with the default install and iCloud login is much more private than Google with a Google Account login. In Google's case, Google Maps has seen everything and can correlate it to your email content, business search activity, current location, and a host of other data especially if you use their search engine or YouTube. In Apple's case, Apple Maps just opened up yelp.com within Safari when you click on a business result (unless you explicitly install the Yelp app and give it permissions).
[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/while-youre-sleeping-y...
[2] https://www.courthousenews.com/data-mining-privacy-suit-agai...
You sure about that? For me tapping on any business info takes me straight to the iOS app store.
A bit of a sidenote, but the worst part is that now Yelp doesn't just nag you to get the app and/or login. It displays the nag splash page and doesn't let you see any information at all until you install the app and/or login.
The main failure is not having something akin to a Google Scout, whereby iOS users could submit info about businesses and streets that lack data. Apple instead hires a ton of contractors in Austin (and now India) to manually trace roads and guess business hours based on anonymized GPS traces.
Apple lacks the scale of Google's army of unpaid Google Scouts (though they could easily fix this) and is wasting time on minutia rather than task their staff/contractors with sourcing & importing higher quality data regularly. One example would be importing county shapefiles, Apple could easily vault ahead of Google Maps if they diffed their map against each of the thousands of county maps in the USA, and they would be the only one regularly doing this (OSM does this occasionally, but not often).
They could also scrape business data from each state and use that to produce more accurate & detailed business listings than Google, among many other low hanging fruit.
In another sense I'm not sure why it should matter to the end user how many interns Apple hires to do things behind the scenes. I'm imagining that Apple is well aware of these shortcomings. Not only that I wonder if operational information observations like this quickly become outdated. i.e. it's all manual and terrible until somebody gets around to automating it.
My son's school is in a kafka-ish situation with Google where their listing is wrong and cannot be changed. People cannot write reviews, and data doesn't get updated.
98/100 times, updates to Apple or Google mapping products are done in hours or days. The 2/100, forget it.
> These user reports take weeks to months to get triaged, making many rather useless.
My experience is closer to the "a few days" as well; they were faster than the one time I remember reporting something to Google Maps. YMMV and all that, but.
Apple's data is flat out junk in London. Garbage.
They weren't able to do this while they were still reliant on third-party data, because the contracts required them to submit those changes to the third-party providers first and then once they were accepted, get them in downstream updates. This is one of the main reasons they invested in building out their own data; they'll be able to accept user-sourced fixes much more quickly.
Choose your poison.
Which is? If I say "Hey Siri, how do I report an error with your navigation?" I get search results for how to report problems with Google Maps. And I definitely don't see any UI widgets that suggest that they're for reporting problems.
There is no "i" button from the navigation screen and there's no "i" button from the search results either if you want to report entirely irrelevant results.
This is likely an intentional design decision, and it sounds like a common-sense safety feature.
> there's no "i" button from the search results either if you want to report entirely irrelevant results.
You can hit the (i) after you make the problematic search.
Great feature for walking and public transit directions. They still have interactive bits for the driving directions — I can't imagine what sort of "common sense" simply hides the report a problem thing until you dig through a few levels of mediocre UI.
You're right, if you click around in the Maps app (desktop or mobile) it takes you straight to the shady source (yelp.com).
Edit: Also this:
https://www.courthousenews.com/data-mining-privacy-suit-agai...
Apple Maps doesn't use Yelp as a primary data source. It's used to add extra information (like reviews and photos) to existing points of interest, but the points of interest themselves are catalogued by Apple or their data providers. If you click around in Apple Maps a bit, you'll find that not all POIs have Yelp data.
> Edit: Also this: [a lawsuit about social features in the Yelp app]
I'm not sure how this is relevant.
Apple Maps steers you pretty hard towards the Yelp app if you want any business info.
Is it? It was widely reported at the time (e.g., [1, 2]) that they were getting rid of Google Maps and creating Apple Maps because Google wanted to keep spoken turn-by-turn directions an Android-only feature.
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2012/09/get_the_fainting_chair
[2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-jilted-google-maps-over-verb...
Is it? Has everyone forgotten the Yelp tracking beacon? Good thing Apple relies on Yelp for business info and has pretty deep Yelp integration with the mobile app.