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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

#101

Post by DoubleGlazing »

nicbou wrote: post #28
inahga wrote: post #6

There are quite a few interesting tracking flows out there. My rent is paid through a company called Bilt. I discovered that when I shop at Walgreens now, Bilt sends me an email containing the full receipt of what I bought like so: > Hey [inahga], > > You shopped at Walgreens on 12/1/24 and earned Bilt Points with your > Neighborhood Pharmacy benefit. > > Items eligible for rewards > TOSTITOS HINT OF LIME RSTC 11OZ >…

Things like that are on my mind when HN rants about GDPR. Something like this would be wildly illegal where I live.

Unfortunately the GDPR is largely toothless if a company without an EU presence chooses to ignore it.

I live in Ireland and my data is in the databases of several US data brokers. Thise conpanies can't be forced to to comply with the GDPR because they simply do not have an EU presence. You don't have to search far to find stories from people people who made complaints to their local Data Protection office about such issues only to be told there's nothing that can be done.

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

#103

Post by maximilianthe1 »

AyyEye wrote: post #99

> There's no "personal information" here, but honestly this amount of data shared with an arbitrary list of 3rd parties is scary. Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones? Screen brightness, boot time, memory, and network operator could probably fingerprint any device all by itself.

A lot of people have "autobrightness" on. I'd think brightness doesn't help much here

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

#104

Post by landr0id »

maximilianthe1 wrote: post #103
AyyEye wrote: post #99

> There's no "personal information" here, but honestly this amount of data shared with an arbitrary list of 3rd parties is scary. Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones? Screen brightness, boot time, memory, and network operator could probably fingerprint any device all by itself.

A lot of people have "autobrightness" on. I'd think brightness doesn't help much here

Kind of a joke, but it could be useful for determining if they should serve light-mode or dark-mode ads. But I suppose they could just detect if dark/light mode are enabled.

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

#105

Post by coin »

curiousthought wrote: post #27
inahga wrote: post #6

There are quite a few interesting tracking flows out there. My rent is paid through a company called Bilt. I discovered that when I shop at Walgreens now, Bilt sends me an email containing the full receipt of what I bought like so: > Hey [inahga], > > You shopped at Walgreens on 12/1/24 and earned Bilt Points with your > Neighborhood Pharmacy benefit. > > Items eligible for rewards > TOSTITOS HINT OF LIME RSTC 11OZ >…

This is called Level 3 data, and any merchant can choose to provide it for a reduction in the transaction fees they pay. Here's a small comment thread from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41213632

Who is Level 3 data shared with, ie who is the aggregator? Is it the credit card bank then aggregates and sells it?

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

#107

Post by anon7000 »

gruez wrote: post #21

>If it was LTE, I bet the lat/lon would be much more precise. False. Apps don't have access to cellid information unless they also have location permissions, in which case they can just request your location directly. >the free apps you install and use collect your precise location with timestamp [...] This is alarmist and contradictory given that the author admits a few paragraphs up that the "location shared was no…

Eh. Zip code level location + timestamp is still pretty invasive, even if, pedantically, that’s not very precise.

We should compare if there a differences in the data sent in countries with better data privacy laws.

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

#108

Post by baxtr »

curiousthought wrote: post #27
inahga wrote: post #6

There are quite a few interesting tracking flows out there. My rent is paid through a company called Bilt. I discovered that when I shop at Walgreens now, Bilt sends me an email containing the full receipt of what I bought like so: > Hey [inahga], > > You shopped at Walgreens on 12/1/24 and earned Bilt Points with your > Neighborhood Pharmacy benefit. > > Items eligible for rewards > TOSTITOS HINT OF LIME RSTC 11OZ >…

This is called Level 3 data, and any merchant can choose to provide it for a reduction in the transaction fees they pay. Here's a small comment thread from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41213632

So in essence the merchant pays with my data?

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

#110

Post by timsh »

sunnybeetroot wrote: post #79

Whilst I trust that the author did in fact look at the data of each request eventually, the screenshot they provided of Charles could not have been of the exact requests they intercepted given Charles is indicating that those are not yet SSL proxied (except for the 2 GET requests). EDIT: please ignore, author did it differently to what I expected.

I decrypted them all by installing Charles SSL cert on the iphone. This is why the requests seem not SSL proxied.
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