For many applications, accessing location data makes perfect sense—why else would you trust a weather app with your whereabouts?

But it turns out that some developers may be inadvertently giving away the store. A new investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has found that the code snippets used in apps—known as SDKs—can sometimes collect and share users' precise location data, even when they have only given permission to the app itself.

The consequence? Your every move could end up on a map for advertisers, data brokers, governments, and potentially hackers. Bill Budington from the EFF notes that while these SDKs make up just a small part of the advertising ecosystem, their reach is vast, affecting billions of users across tens of thousands of apps.

The trade-off, it seems, is between making money and protecting privacy. Advertising SDKs are designed to monetize app data, but at what cost? Your location history isn't just personal; it’s sensitive information that could be exploited or misused if it falls into the wrong hands.