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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

#191
post #177

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…

>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. Fortunately this is changing with iOS 18 with "limited contacts" sharing. https://mobiledevmemo.com/wp-cont…

People will share their whole list because it’s simpler

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

#192
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 >…

If you find the condoms overly sensitive you can try one of the "long lasting" versions.

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

#194

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.

Like adverts in general the value of your data or your attention is tiny.

The average American spends $200 (via higher costs for products) for TV each year and receives how many hundreds of hours of adverts in return?

The superbowl for example gets $5 for every viewer, for about an hour of adverts. What’s the average hour of time worth?

Facebook might suck up your data and flog it for a few cents, you’ve probably got more cash down the back of the sofa.

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

#195

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.

IDK, I think almost all interesting data has no obvious single owner, because it gets created as a side effect of an interaction between two or more parties.

Take the transaction information from example above. The record of you buying products X, Y, Z for total t=x+y+z at time T, with card C - both you and the store could argue they're entitled to it. It's about you and money you spent and products you received, but it's also about them and the money they received and the products that were taken off their inventory. Then the card issuer will interject saying, "hey, the customer uses a card we provide as a service, so we're at least entitled to know which card was use to pay, to whom, when, an what the total amount was!". Then both yours and stores' banks will chime in, and behind them, also the POS terminal provider.

Truth is, they all have a point. We like to think that paying for groceries with our watch is like a medieval peasant paying for fruit with metal coins at a town market. It's not. Electronic payments always involve multiple steps handled automatically, in the background, by half a dozen service providers linked by their own contracts and with their own legal reporting requirements, and each of them really do need to know at least some details about the payment they're participating in.

A simpler example: this comment. It's obviously mine. It's also a response to you, and it only makes sense in context of the whole subthread. Should anyone reply to it, they'll gain a stake in it, too - and then, arguably, everyone following this discussion have a right to read it, now and in the future. After I hit the "Reply" button, I can't in good conscience claim this comment is mine and only mine. This is why I'm personally against the practice of unilaterally mass-deleting of comments on open discussion boards, like e.g. plenty of people do on Reddit, forever ruining useful discussions for the public.

(It's also why I like HN's approach to GDPR, which is, you can get your account disassociated from your comments, and you can request potentially identifying content be removed, but the site won't just mass-delete your comments automatically.)

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> while Google sees roughly 85% of all American cardholder swipe I'm probably not reading this properly, can you say that a different way?

[deleted]

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

#197
post #193

Anyone understand why an apparently accurate latitude/longitude showed up in one of those traces despite location services not being enabled for the app in question?

A previous request maybe mapped their IP back to the geo, and that data was used subsequently, maybe?

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

#198
post #193

Anyone understand why an apparently accurate latitude/longitude showed up in one of those traces despite location services not being enabled for the app in question?

Probably Mozilla location services (which I happily block) which does pretty accurate passive location tracking.

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

#199
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.

> adding entropy to de-anonymize users _removing_ entropy, by adding more information bits

Technically, information are the bits you DON'T know. Once you know the bits, it isn't "information" in the Shannon sense, in that it takes no energy to reset a message if you know all the bits, but takes N-units of energy for N unknown bits of information. (See; Feynman's lectures on computation)

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

#200

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…

I don't think everyone is better off, at best the "less price sensitive" is unaffected. But then you have to have have some way of stopping arbitrage via the customers paying the lower price through some sort of identity checks or restrictions. I think that's an unavoidable negative outcome and it's not clear that it would always be outweighed by allowing more people to consume the product.
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