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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

#331
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extended to add don’t use websites without blockers. If they are willing to track via app, why would we think they would not track via browser?

The browser has less access to your system, and usually only if you give a specific website permission to use these features. Mobile operating systems are slowly changing that though.

Have you looked at the latest JS standards?

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

#332
post #249

Reddit app has no permissions on my phone, but the feed suggests communities based on my location never the less. I've been traveling for the last two months, every city I've been has been suggested

It’s just an IP look up. I travel a lot and you can tell where certain podcast episodes were downloaded based on dynamic ad insertion

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

#333

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…

It's kind of how people used to make fun of the CIA types and "undercover" operatives.

Look for the guy wearing a conspicuously plain leather jacket and baseball cap. "Why hello there average looking stranger I've never met. Psss, 'tis a fair day, but it'll be lovelier this evening.'" "Oh ... it's Murphy the spy you want."

Also, found out the CIA declassified a bunch of jokes several years back in searching to respond. [1] Most are already dead links on CIA.gov, yet there's a few remaining. Nother one on people commenting on the CIA. [2] "These types are swin- Ask in Langley if they work for the CIA. Every- Ask in Langley. They will tells one knows them." 'You, it's the big building behind.'

[1] https://nationalpost.com/news/the-cia-has-declassified-a-bun...

[2] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp75-00149r000...

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

#334

Is WiFi access point geolocation by SSID or MAC address? Do mobile OS's require additional permissions for apps to get either of these data points?

On iOS at least you can set the MAC address to be different per access point or to rotate on the same access point or to use your normal MAC

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

#335
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it's not properly appreciated that Apple fully endorses all of this. [...] they uniquely could stop this (at the price of devastating their app store), but choose not to. A perfectly privacy respecting app store isn't going to do any good if it doesn't have any apps. Just look at f-droid. Most (all?) of the apps there might be privacy respecting, but good luck getting any of the popular apps (eg. facebook, t…

> A perfectly privacy respecting app store isn't going to do any good if it doesn't have any apps. 40 years ago apps were sold on floppy disks. 30 years ago they were sold on CD-ROMs. 20 years ago, DVDs. Online-only apps are a recent thing. A privacy respecting app store certainly can be a thing. Apps being blocked or banned from stores for choosing to not respect your privacy is a good thing.

>Online-only apps are a recent thing. A privacy respecting app store certainly can be a thing.

I'm not sure you're trying say. I specifically acknowledged the existence of f-droid as a "privacy respecting app store" in the quoted comment.

>Apps choosing to not respect your privacy, and being blocked or banned from stores, is a good thing.

"a good thing" doesn't mean much when most people haven't even heard of your app store, and are missing out on all the popular apps that people want. Idealism doesn't mean much when nobody is using it. Apple might not be the paragon of privacy, but they had a greater impact on user privacy than f-droid ever will. To reiterate OP's point: what's the point of having a perfectly private OS and app store, when there's no apps for it, and your normie friends/relatives are going to sell you out anyways by uploading their entire contact list and photos (both with you in it) to google and meta?

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

#336
post #8
post #2

Shame on all of the people working on those systems. Legit companies trying to make the world better struggle to find competent people.

I think a big part of the ability of these shady companies pulling the brightest minds away from more clearly beneficial fields is that important flavors of ideology necessary to motivate people to take less lucrative work have been stripped from "business". There's a lot fewer appeals to art, history, cultural stewardship, or empire-building present in things like transportation, medicine, construction, etc. than th…

American business has never cared about any of that stuff. It was always lip service.

Also if you haven’t heard, the US government is currently a shit show right now run by Musk as far as employment

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

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iOS definitely requires Precise location permission allowed for the app to see your WiFi name / ssid and other WiFi around you

But all it takes is one app with that permission to tie you to all the others. And there are always apps that need your location at some point to provide useful data. At this point I’m not sure there’s any single app I trust.

> apps that need your location

And, triangulating client's public IP address will also give away location with decent precision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37507355

btw, we need a securephones.io [0] part 2 focusing on apps.

[0] cert has expired

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

#338
post #109

wow @apokryptein thanks for posting my article here... I'm shocked it's #1 rn. if anyone has any questions regarding the post - I'm here to answer & talk!

Great article, thanks for taking the time to research and write it all up! Definitely learned some new things from it.

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

#339

I clicked the link at the beginning of your article, that led to the Google sheet with the list of apps. That list had 12,373 lines, not “over 2,000”, fyi. And while most of the apps looked like small time games that I have never downloaded and would probably not download, I saw included there “Microsoft Office 365”. Interesting.

Here's my messy list of all the apps I recognized in that Google Sheet: meetup, tinder, crunchyroll zynga/wordswithfriends, Microsoft Outlook com.microsoft.office.outlook, Weather channel, Microsoft 365 (Office) com.microsoft.office.officehubrow Opera Mini browser beta com.opera.mini.native.beta, BuzzFeed - Quizzes & News com.buzzfeed.android Tetris® Block Puzzle com.playstudios.tetris4 Sonic the Hedgehog™ Classic com.sega.sonic1px Grindr Flipboard: The Social Magazine Flightradar24 | Flight Tracker Bejeweled Blitz com.ea.BejeweledBlitz_row FarmVille 3 – Farm Animals Plants vs Zombies™ 2 com.ea.game.pvz2_row SimCity BuildIt 913292932 Tetris® 1491074310 Opera Mini: Fast Web Browser com.opera.mini.native TuneIn Radio: Music & Sports 418987775 Yahoo Mail – Organized Email com.yahoo.mobile.client.android.mail Angry Birds 2 com.rovio.baba Skip-Bo 1538912205 CamScanner - PDF Scanner App com.intsig.camscanner Rakuten Viber Messenger com.viber.voip Candy Crush Saga 553834731

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

#340
post #86

Would be interesting to know how much data leaks on a new iPhone with some of the iOS privacy settings enabled and a handful of popular apps installed (WhatsApp, Instagram, Google Maps, Uber, etc). And then if you use a commercial VPN with DNS ad-blocking enabled, how much more does this help?

Going by TFA, not much.
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