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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

#201

Post by [deleted] »

create-username wrote: post #191
gruez wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by ec109685 »

zzo38computer wrote: post #161

Even just to look at the picture near the top (which is also repeated near the bottom), if you do not allow the app to track you that only disables one of the items of the information and not all of them. This is explained later in the document, that it is not explained very well to end users. I agree that it could be explained better. Perhaps, "Allow app to track your activity..." can have a option to display a more…

There is more to it when a user disallows an app to track your activity. From Apple and enforced in their review guidelines:

“The app is also not permitted to track your activity using other information that identifies you or your device, like your email address.”

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

#203

Post by adrr »

elmomle wrote: post #91
jiri wrote: post #32

What does happen if I turn off location/gps? I guess that location has to be quite imprecise.

With GPS off, location can triangulated from cell tower usage to within 3/4 of a square mile (smaller uncertainty in urban areas where cell towers are closer together). I'd heard before that some data brokers do this, but in this article the writer mentions reverse DNS lookup on IP addresses, which they mention is less precise (ZIP-code level).

It’s not that accurate. E911 location was a few miles off.

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

#206

Post by x0x0 »

gruez wrote: post #177
qingcharles wrote: post #156

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…

I think it's not properly appreciated that Apple fully endorses all of this. For two reasons: (1) the provision of the output of billions of dollars of developer time to their users for no up front cost (made back via ads) is super valuable to their platform; and (2) they uniquely could stop this (at the price of devastating their app store), but choose not to.

In light of that, perhaps reevaluate their ATT efforts as far less about meaningful privacy and far more about stealing $10B a year or so from Facebook.

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

#207

Post by phba »

sureglymop wrote: post #76

A while ago a co worker told me "why would you care about your privacy? all my data is already out there anyway and what can even be done with it anyway". What would be the ideal response to such an absurd comment? At the time I found it hard to answer because she surprised me with that opinion. Edit to note: the explanation should be compatible with a professional context. I don't want to scare my co workers or appe…

Losing privacy makes you more vulnerable to economic exploitation (price discrimination, salary negotiation, insurance premiums, etc). Therefore protecting your privacy is a form of economic self-defense.

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

#208

Post by yolovoe »

fragmede wrote: post #174
Terretta wrote: post #135

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?

Google buys transaction data from credit card companies (Visa, Mastercard, etc). They almost certainly know what you spend money on

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

#209

Post by pyromaker »

I don't think there is a hope when it comes to our privacy and ads and our data being sold - none. Even if I'm somewhat off the grid or low in activities, the indirect way of targeting me still exists, by my family members, friends, people associated with me. I surrender.

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

#210

Post by aorloff »

jmward01 wrote: post #30

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…

There's no question about who the players involved are.

https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-...

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