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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

#211

Post by terminalgravity »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #184
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…

What marketplaces do you use?

Im also curious about this. Is it just a website you place an order or do you have to go through some kind of agent?

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

#212

Post by chgs »

uoaei wrote: post #137
devmor wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you think there are different ethical concerns when dealing with non Americans?

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

#213

Post by jkaplowitz »

gruez wrote: post #132
jkaplowitz wrote: post #117

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…

> 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).

As I said, in Germany you can indeed have your cake and eat it too in this regard, if you’re okay with the offers you receive being less targeted and therefore less appealing.

My understanding is that GDPR requires them to offer the option to decline the personalized targeting without being blocked from participation overall, and this is probably the same anywhere in the EU. But I don’t have personal experience with this in other EU countries and could be misunderstanding.

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

#214

Post by andrepd »

Terretta wrote: post #135
bredren wrote: post #124

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...

How on earth is this legal

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

#215

Post by nicbou »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #101
nicbou wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A common discussion these days is the threat of a foreign app (TikTok) being used by a hostile government to track and influence Americans.

From my non-American perspective, the same thing is happening here. I distrust non-EU software by default.

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

#216

Post by iamacyborg »

kortilla wrote: post #112
anon7000 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s honestly crazy that we allow companies to sell our data — and even financially incentivize companies to share our data like this.

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.

This is fairly easily answered through legislation like the GDPR which classes this data as personal data if it’s associated with an identified or identifiable person.

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

#217

Post by actionfromafar »

andrepd wrote: post #214
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...

How on earth is this legal

Corporations are people, too.

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

#218

Post by actionfromafar »

chgs wrote: post #212
uoaei wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you think there are different ethical concerns when dealing with non Americans?

Also a great question.

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

#219

Post by kortilla »

throw_away32 wrote: post #128
kortilla wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN rants about it because it’s not a good solution. It identified a problem but caused an idiotic fallout (cookie banners) and failed to actually put in a framework to enforce that companies aren’t just lying.

> failed to actually put in a framework to enforce that companies aren’t just lying. That's not true. I work in an European company and we were contacted by the agency to give a complete list of partners that we use, reasons for why it is justified, which routines we have for deleting old data etc. I guess in theory we could have lied and made up data, but only an idiot would risk lying to the government. Everyone at…

The lie doesn’t have to be intentional. All it takes is a really simple accidental debug logging flag to collect what amounts to a GDPR violation.

The point is that no effort was made to implement a technical solution to protect privacy. So it’s upsettingly trivial to violate the GDPR unknowingly and any company that is even a little unscrupulous (of which there are hundreds) can easily ignore the law.

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

#220

Post by sebastiennight »

jmward01 wrote: post #72
nickburns wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately fingerprinting prevention/resistance tactics become a readily identifiable signal unto themselves. I.e., the 'random noise' becomes fingerprintable if not widely utilized. Everyone would need to be generating the same 'random noise' for any such tactics to be truly effective.

A sufficient number of people would need to, not everyone. And if I were the only one then tracking companies wouldn't adjust for just me. Basically, if this were to catch on then ad trackers wouldn't adjust until there was enough traffic for it to work. Also, that doesn't negate the ability to use this to create fake credentials that aids in tracking ads back to their source.

They don't need to adjust.

Here's a real-life example: You show up alone at the airport with a full-face mask and gray coveralls. You are perfectly hidden. But you are the only such hidden person, and there is still old cam footage of you in the airport parking lot, putting on the clothes. The surveillance team can let you act anonymous all you want. They still know who you are, because your disguise IS the unique fingerprint.

Now the scenario you're shooting for here is:

10 people are now walking around the airport in full-face masks and gray coveralls. You think, "well now they DO NOT know if it's ME, or some terrorist, or some random other guy from HN!"

But really, they still have this super-specific fingerprint (there are still less than 1 person in a million with this disguise) and all they need is ONE identifying characteristic (you're taller than the other masked people, maybe) to know who's who.

They didn't need to adjust their system one bit.

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