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Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

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Re: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

#51
post #49
post #35

> Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones? This is clearly adding entropy to de-anonymize users between apps, rather than to add specificity to ad bids.

Everything listed changes way too often to be useful for tracking. My guess is that it's for anti-fraud purposes. Someone setting up fake devices and/or device farms is likely to get similar values, which means they can be detected via ML or whatever.

> screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones

None of those are likely to change when you navigate from one website to another, with tracking/ads disabled, which is what they want to be able to track. Otherwise they'd just use their cookies.

One device visits a site where you sell ads. A minute later, an unknown device with identical battery, volume, headphone, brightness, model number, browser version, and boot time to the second arrives on another site you run ads on. There's a pretty good chance they're related, because the odds of all those being the same plus those two sites and recent timings involved is rather low: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Plus it doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough in bulk to sell.

Re: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

#52
post #36

A long time ago I had the idea to create an 'accountability server'. The high level idea was for it to generate unique credentials so that you could track to the source who sold your info. There are some ways to do that now, but I wonder if it is time to start exploring that idea again. If you exposed it as a VPN/proxy+app that ran on a server in your home, so that you could collect your own data and provide unique c…

Wouldn't this require access to bid side data? The OP mentions it's pretty easy to get, but any company using this to expose advertisers is going to get their access cut off pretty fast. As the saying goes, "snitches get stitches".

My thought here is that there is likely a lot of leaked data on ads themselves, that is one of the reasons why you would need the VPN/proxy. Additionally you could (potentially) create fake browser fingerprint credentials on the fly to feed sites and have the VPN/proxy track the ads that show up for those credentials. (other credentials like email and the like could also be created by the app for you) You don't see the bid data, but you may be able to control the tracking that spurs it and you can see the results of it so a setup like this could likely make some inferences.

I don't know this industry well and the tech here has long sense eclipsed me so I really don't know what is possible but I imagine there are possibilities with this setup.

Re: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

#53
post #17
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. Eye roll on the whole “make the world better”. So few SV products remotely make the world better. The purpose of the vast majority is to make money at all costs. I also disagree with what most people claim is making the world better. All in all, I think social media is a net negative for the world for any good that might be found. Every SV thing after that is just chasing the recketship to the moon dream.

I believe this was parodied multiple times in season 1 of Silicon Valley.

Direct link to the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso

Re: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

#55
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just use cash/certified check from now on You might want to discover about sophistication and pervasive facial recognition technology used by major retailers. Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For "fraud prevention", of course.

>Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For "fraud prevention", of course. They can already track you through your phone and/or credit cards. Why bother setting up a massive facial recognition system for people paying with cash when they only account for 10% (or whatever) of overall shoppers, and have less disposable income than average?

idk why, but they do

Re: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

#56

Is WiFi access point geolocation by SSID or MAC address? Do mobile OS's require additional permissions for apps to get either of these data points?

iOS definitely requires Precise location permission allowed for the app to see your WiFi name / ssid and other WiFi around you

Re: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

#57
post #35

> Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones? This is clearly adding entropy to de-anonymize users between apps, rather than to add specificity to ad bids.

It would be amazing if you could build and send fake profiles of this information to create fake browser fingerprints and help track the trackers. Similarly, creating a lot of random noise here may help hide the true signal, or at least make their job a lot harder.

Re: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

#58
post #35

> Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones? This is clearly adding entropy to de-anonymize users between apps, rather than to add specificity to ad bids.

It's also useful for making ads more effective & manipulation overall. As long as you can connect the data you track & buy, you can use Thompson sampling. In fact, why would we think knowing the name of a person is anything but bad business?

Re: Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

#60
post #8
post #2

Shame on all of the people working on those systems. Legit companies trying to make the world better struggle to find competent people.

I think a big part of the ability of these shady companies pulling the brightest minds away from more clearly beneficial fields is that important flavors of ideology necessary to motivate people to take less lucrative work have been stripped from "business". There's a lot fewer appeals to art, history, cultural stewardship, or empire-building present in things like transportation, medicine, construction, etc. than th…

i believe there are somewhat fewer practicing freemasons in those places of layte.
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