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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

#301

Post by the_pwner224 »

XorNot wrote: post #232
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…

The thing is...contact details aren't really private information, basically by definition. The distinction is contact details privacy is based on the desire not be interrupted by people you didn't agree to be interrupted by - i.e. it's a spam problem - and realistically to solve this requires a total revamp of our communications systems (long overdue). The basic level of this would be forcing businesses to positively…

Check out Simplex chat. I just read about it from this HN submission yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42904966

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

#302

Post by ericjmorey »

josephg wrote: post #259
vlan0 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually this could prove very useful for a resistance movement. Take them down with with their own medicine.

Yeah, I wonder if it might help to create a little newsletter for politicians and regulators. Send emails telling them exactly where they are, what apps they use, and so on. And send them the same information about their children.

They would make adjustments so that their details are protected, but the regular user is not.

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

#303

Post by AdieuToLogic »

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…

> Lastly, does your insurance shoot up if you have a car without one of these systems?

This question I can answer with a reasonable degree of certainty; no, it does not.

Insurance companies increase rates for automobile coverage for many reasons, real or illusionary. But "does your insurance shoot up" strictly for not having a recording device in a vehicle is not one of them.

Do some insurance companies charge less when provided access to policy owner driving patterns which the companies infer reduce their risk? Sure.

But that is a different question.

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

#304

Post by TechDebtDevin »

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…

I can relatively easily skip trace people but where are you buying specific peoples information? Do you mean youre skip tracing or buying directly from data brokers?

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

#305

Post by araes »

mschuster91 wrote: post #159
araes wrote: post #154

Parts I found relevant: - It was a clean state of a somewhat old phone (iPhone 11, factory defaults + new apple id) - A single (old) app was installed (Stack by KetchApp, 10-12 years old) - Was sending out an update a second pretty much instantly (5 kB - ~300 KB every second) - Within a minute: IP, Lat / Lon, country, phone model, carrier / network operator, vendor, OS version, connection type (wifi), headphone statu…

> The headphone, volume, brightness, and battery was just "what" kind of headshake about invasiveness. Somebody'd hand wave they need it (we want it, we want it). They obviously don't. Well the why the ad industry wants it is clear: fingerprinting and segmentation. Someone consistently low on battery? Push them ads for powerbanks.

This is actually part of what I find so wrong about this entire idea.

With all this fine granularity, it seems like ads would be incredibly relevant. Specifically about what you need with something that might actually result in a click-through to purchase a product. Especially if they get real-time updates on my hard-drive status and battery state.

I don't remember the last time I got an ad that was actually relevant. Pretty sure the last ad that was even clicked on was one of those little windmills that swirls crazily, cause it seemed like it might make a cool lawn ornament. Turned out it was tiny. Years of online purchases, and they don't even suggest stuff I want.

It just seems like an excuse.

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

#306

Post by theptip »

sebastiennight wrote: post #220
jmward01 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

I think this is a slightly different case no? If the ad network is using a very high precision variable to soft-link anonymized accounts, then randomizing the values between apps should break that.

Your analogy applies more to things like trying to anonymize your traffic with Tor, where using such an anonymizer flags your IP as doing something weird vs other users. I’m not convinced simply fuzzing the values would be detectable, assuming you pick values that other real users could pick.

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

#307

Post by [deleted] »

ActorNightly wrote: post #284
lysace wrote: post #123

I wonder: to which extent are purchased/brokered app real-time location data feeds used by various intelligence services to target missile strikes in war zones? In e.g. Ukraine/Russia.

The leaked tools that NSA used, like XKEYSCORE, used publicly available data collection methods, including purchasing advertiser lists, to cross correlate all the data and form a profile. So anybody could do this stuff.

[deleted]

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

#308

Post by wkat4242 »

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…

And the combination of contacts are also unique enough to identify you. Even though they change over time. Some fuzzy matching, take in another few bits of fingerprint like device type and country and voila no advertiser ID required.

Ps smart idea to use it for that purpose. If I failed to get proper service I'd just review bomb the company everywhere and soon enough I'd get a call fixing my problem and asking to remove them :)

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

#309

Post by ironmagma »

_heimdall wrote: post #294
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…

It is possible to just not use a phone number. I mostly connect through Signal. I do technically have a phone number that my close friends and family have, but its a random VoIP number that I usually change every year or so. Surprisingly no one has really cared, I send out a text that I got a new number and that's that.

How? Most of the services I use, from Walgreens to banks to retirement accounts, require a phone number either for 2FA or just to verify that you’re you when signing up. After changing my phone number this year and having to go through the rigamarole for each service, I decided never again.

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

#310

Post by dylan604 »

sneak wrote: post #253
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…

How about a no/limited internet setting? So many apps spy on you and they don’t need network at all to function.

Until the app's devs get wise to this, and do not allow the app to function without the network access. It could be as simple as a full screen, non-closable screen that says the app requires network access with a button to the proper setting to correct the issue.
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