171–180 of 628 posts
One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do. As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd. And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wh…
my grandmother collected green stamps from the grocery store, which she saved for food discounts.. I don't think that there was any customer ID involved at all..
honestly, describing pervasive tracking of purchasing associated with govt ID as "normal" is .. its a sickness and parts of it are illegal now. It is not required or "normal" at all, from this view
I'm a very happy paying customer of NextDNS ( https://nextdns.io ) which blocks known adware and tracking hosts across all mobile and desktop platforms.
Facebook hard-code IP addresses when their domains are blocked. I found this out while using NextDNS alongside that logging functionality that iPhones have. It’s insane the lengths that they go to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I'm probably not reading this properly, can you say that a different way?
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.
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
> choose to provide it for a reduction in the transaction fees they pay.
That would explain why I can use my credit card for rent without a transaction fee! No free lunch!
One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do. As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd. And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketp…
>As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.
Fortunately this is changing with iOS 18 with "limited contacts" sharing.
https://mobiledevmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/image.p...
The interface also seems specifically designed to push people to allow only a subset of contacts, rather than blindly clicking "allow all".
The far bigger issue is the contact info you share with online retailers. Scraping contact info through apps is very visible, drawing flak from the media and consumers. Most of the time all you get is a name (could be a nickname), and maybe some combination of phone/email/address, depending on how diligent the person in filling out all the fields. On the other hand placing any sort of order online requires you to provide your full name, address, phone number, and email address. You can also be reasonably certain that they're all accurate, because they're plausibly required for delivery/billing purposes. Such data can also be surreptitiously fed to data brokers behind the scenes, without an obvious "tiktok would like access to your contacts" modal.
One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do. As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd. And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketp…
Assuming these marketplaces operate within the bounds of the law, would it break HN’s ToS to post them? I’d be interested in pursuing the same strategy.
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’ve had to deal with Bilt [0]. In case you’re not aware, they have a “feature” called Instant Link that automatically pulls ALL of your personal and sensitive financial data from financial institutions, including your credit card accounts, balances, etc. They apparently do this via a partnership with a company called Method Financial [1]. It’s frankly the most intrusive thing I’ve ever encountered in any software I’…
