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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

#131

Post by xyst »

Apple’s “privacy protections” are nothing more than marketing.

“Ask app not to track” is a wash and privacy theater at best. One of the reasons I still run ad blocking on _all_ websites and at the network layer. Sorry “content creators” but you need to get your revenue from elsewhere (ie, sponsored content).

Now I want a phone that scrambles all of this data on a per app (or phone) basis.

Malicious app wants this data? Sure you can have it. But you will get randomized values for every bit of information — resolution, lat/lon, brightness, battery level (user can set range of 90-100%), ….

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

#132

Post by gruez »

jkaplowitz wrote: post #117
barrkel wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price discrimination is not a priori bad. A fixed price with enough margin to support the business may be too high for price sensitive consumers. If you can charge more to less price sensitive consumers, you can, at the margin, make a little bit on these price sensitive consumers, and overall everyone is better off - more consumers are satisfied and their marginal willingness to consume a unit of the thing being sold…

There are ways to adequately approximate that kind of price discrimination without detailed tracking though, like giving discounts to students, seniors, and people receiving various kinds of welfare benefit upon showing proof of status. Yeah it isn’t as accurate as the privacy-invasive kind of tracking, since students and seniors can be wealthy and eligibility for welfare benefits doesn’t always consider assets or gi…

>I do think it’s fine for people to opt in to more tracking as a separate consent choice beyond merely participating in a loyalty program, for example to get more personalized and therefore more useful offers, but not as a condition of participation to merely receive at least standard offers and accumulate points. That’s how they generally work in Germany.

Sounds like that'll push retailers to switch from a system where they give points/discounts to everyone, to one where points/discounts are "targeted", which of course requires opting into tracking. Like I said before, the whole premise of loyalty programs is that you're being tracked in exchange for rewards. You really can't expect to have your cake (discounts) and eat it too (not being tracked).

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

#134

Post by AlotOfReading »

everdrive wrote: post #84

I'm really happy to see this level of detail and research. So many privacy-related articles either wholly lack in technical skill, or hysterically cannot differentiate between different levels of privacy concerns and risks. People commonly point to Mozilla's research regarding vehicle's privacy policies. ( https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-... ) But that research only states what the car com…

Those aren't questions that have fixed answers. The data available is pretty far beyond what I'm personally comfortable with though.

One OEM I'm familiar with had such a policy. My org determined that we needed a statistical reference to compare against within a certain area. Some calls were made to the right people and shortly after we had a (mildly) anonymized map of high precision tracks for every vehicle of that brand within the area over some period.

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

#135

Post by Terretta »

bredren wrote: post #124
baxtr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in essence the merchant pays with my data?

Yes, though people also welcome the extra cash back or other card benefits. Apple Card does not sell this data, IIRC. But offers a lower cash back than many other cards.

True, while Google sees roughly 85% of all American cardholder swipes and doesn't need to sell it since they're making the ad market...

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

#136

Post by mdasen »

This is a wonderful write up. The part that isn't clear to me is how they're getting the geolocation data if location services are turned off. Are they just going off geo-ip lookups? If you grant access to Bluetooth or finding devices on your local network, they can get more information to track your location. Absent that, how would they get better than geo-ip?

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

#137

Post by uoaei »

devmor wrote: post #95
uoaei wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any documentation on this to read further? I.e. what the different levels contain and how much on average is the cost reduction for the merchant.

Here is implementation documentation from Mastercard about l3: https://na-gateway.mastercard.com/api/documentation/integrat... The cost reduction is very small, it’s applied to interchange fees. I’ve been directly responsible for implementing this functionality on payment gateways for multiple processors because it helps reduce fraud holds as well.

Separate question, what are your ethics around the surveillance of Americans' economic activities by private actors? What "rights" are relevant in this space and which do you subscribe to?

I'm not going to debate you about anything, I just don't get the chance to ask insiders any of these questions.

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

#138

Post by crazygringo »

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 >…

I believe that's opt-in. At least it seemed to be when my landlord switched to Bilt.

There's a section of your Bilt profile that shows your other credit cards and whether you want them linked. It's pretty freaky to see them listed in the first place.

I definitely keep them off.

Bilt is ultimately a big points/reward program though, so you might get points for having them connected.

I still haven't figured out exactly what Bilt's business plan is, but the main part seems to be trying to get as much financial data on people as possible, and partnering with landlords to do so, and since it's how to pay your rent you can't unenroll completely. (Unless you maybe mail your landlord a paper check?)

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

#139

Post by BobaFloutist »

robotnikman wrote: post #121
kortilla wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that to you it seems like your data but to Walgreens they see it as theirs. They generated it with their point of sale system. The data is about a transaction that you made, but they generated all of it. Until we have agreement as a society about what “my data” means, this kind of stuff is going to run rampant.

>what “my data” means It makes me wonder, if everyone 'owned' their own data, I wonder if it could be used as a form of UBI. Everyone has data from using services, everyone owns it, everyone can sell it to make a living just doing whatever they are doing everyday. This is only just a shower thought I had the other day though, there are probably many pitfalls when it comes to such an idea.

Honestly the path to "UBI" is probably just socialized/subsidized basic needs.

Build masses of government housing, make a healthcare public option with sliding-scale costs, and you're 90% of the way there - food and decent low-end broadband are frankly already cheap enough for the government to cover with maybe some "Don't gouge Uncle Sam or else" clauses and that's about everything.

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

#140

Post by dietr1ch »

barrkel wrote: post #111
dietr1ch wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So called loyalty programs should be illegal on multiple fronts, - Privacy: There's obvious tracking of purchasing trends. This derails into selling user data to everyone that makes people increasingly easy to track. - Customer-dependent pricing / Price-discrimination: This is awful for economy, in econ 101 you learn that business want to charge each customer as much as they are willing to pay, but this differentiate…

Price discrimination is not a priori bad. A fixed price with enough margin to support the business may be too high for price sensitive consumers. If you can charge more to less price sensitive consumers, you can, at the margin, make a little bit on these price sensitive consumers, and overall everyone is better off - more consumers are satisfied and their marginal willingness to consume a unit of the thing being sold…

Yes, this is the reason why it's sort of illegal, but done anyways.

Honestly, beyond paying fewer fees on the bus as a kid, I'm pretty sure I'm being scammed everytime I experience price discrimination.

I feel it's easier to make it illegal and give away reasonable credits to all consumers. I wouldn't discriminate in credits either, I'd rather have public transportation being free for all than claim to save money that society needs to spend anyway.

It doesn't help that lying about the price at any point just makes accounting harder, and creates space for wrong, uncompetitive pricing, or awful deals that would hurt business and society in the longer term anyway.

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