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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

#391
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's odd that of the two replies referencing people, both got their names obviously wrong. Is that a new phishing tactic?

New AI tactic.

salting the fields are we? total informational warfare, the digital equivalent of Sherburne's March to the sea during the American Civil War.

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

#392
The people who reported about the Gravy analytics leak is 404media. They're an independent techincal media group that has been reporting on stories I haven't seen elsewhere. They're pretty awesome. I've personally paid-subscribed. (I'm not affilated with them, nor am I receiving comp to say this)

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

#393
post #253
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.

Fully denying internet access for an app is actually in iOS and has been there for many years.

But it's only available in China.

https://tinyapps.org/blog/202209100700_ios_disable_wifi_per_...

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

#394
post #376

It's a bit ironic that Privacy Badger extension finds 7 trackers on the article's page.

It looks like these all come from the Reddit embed in the middle of the article. Default uBlock Origin settings blocks 13 urls (and more, due to Reddit's frequent pings), but disable 3rd-party frames brings it down to 1 url (since the original embed was blocked).

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

#395
post #95
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any documentation on this to read further? I.e. what the different levels contain and how much on average is the cost reduction for the merchant.

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.

Is this data requestable via a GDPR takeout?

searching for “mastercard level 3 data takeout” and such bring up the same 5 pages that are not relevant.

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

#396
post #253
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.

Android can do this

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

#397

I find it fascinating reading hacker news, full of IT folk who simultaneously build software that enables and profits from the advertising and personal information selling & tracking industry - are also the same people who complain the loudest about it. Unbelievable.

That seems like trying to tie two separate groups together. Most people are not working on software remotely adjacent to this.

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

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(and if you haven't... check out the APIs available to the developers/owners of all the websites you browse: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API )

what should imply checking available web apis? the comments is correct, browser can't access your location without explicit confirmation from the user, the same apply for other web apis, or at least mention a bunch of them which you know don't apply instead of linkin MDN

The more APIs available for JS to interact with, the more granular and detailed browser fingerprinting can be. For example, how your browser renders WebGL can differ depending on what graphics card (and drivers) you have. The resulting values can be read back and stored to create a detailed fingerprint of who you are -- this could potentially be done by Google Fonts or AdSense or any number of the countless ad and analytics frameworks loaded on basically all websites.

Good overview about how fingerprinting works: https://www.privacyaffairs.com/browser-fingerprinting/

Browse the source in the following directory to see a plethora of examples of how web APIs are used to fingerprint users -- and this is just one publicly-accessible library we can easily review the source code of (proprietary, obfuscated ones likely use additional methods): https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs/tree/master/s...

One example used in multiple places in the above repo is "matchMedia"[0] which was a Web API method added a while ago (well, many years ago) to give a programmatic result of whether a given CSS media query matches or not. This can be used to detect, for example, user preferences like whether the display is HDR-capable[1], or the Accessibility setting "reduce motion" is enabled[2].

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/matc...

[1] https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs/blob/master/s...

[2] https://github.com/fingerprintjs/fingerprintjs/blob/master/s...

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