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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

#401

Post by bruce511 »

otteromkram wrote: post #383
ajcp wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but that's not generalizable. You only referenced two companies...

EBay, Amazon, Walmart, CVS, etc. Name a major company, then try to contact customer service and interact with an actual human. Even if they do have a contact phone number, good luck navigating the mazes of voice prompts. Amazon isn't actually so bad about this, but I couldn't tell you if their CSR chat bot is an actual person or mid-level AI by now.

My only connection to Amazon support has been for AWS.

Perhaps though this should be an example of good customer service where talking to a human is easy, and not lumped in with the likes of Google where its impossible.

Perhaps your experience with the online shop is different, but frankly they're in my "good" column, not my "bad" column.

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

#403

Post by nomilk »

> Advertising Tracking ID was actually set to 000000-0000... because I "Asked app not to track".

> I checked this by manually disabling and enabling tracking option for the Stack app and comparing requests in both cases.

> And that's the only difference between allowing and disallowing tracking

This is revealing! I'd wondered about Apple's curious wording "Ask App not to track" leaves suspicious wriggle room - apps may not track by an id, but could easily 'fingerprint' users (given how much other data is sent), so even without a unique ID, enough data would be provided for them to know who you are 99% of the time.

Amended Dead Privacy Theory:

The Dead Internet Theory says most activity on the internet is by bots [0]. The Dead Privacy Theory says approximately all private data is not private; but rather is accessible on whim by any data scientist, SWE, analyst, or db admin with access to the database, and third parties.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

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

#404

Post by mixmastamyk »

gog wrote: post #262
XorNot wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally explained in the second paragraph there. You can't have private information which is meant to also be shared widely. It is the distinction between Access and Authorization.

But it's not meant to be shared widely, for most people it's meant to be shared with consideration and/or permission. Also, it's not just about "a desire not be interrupted by people you didn't agree to be interrupted by", it's about not having the data in the first place, for any reason, including tracking of any sorts.

Thread is discussing business contact details.

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

#405

Post by conductr »

baxtr wrote: post #108
curiousthought wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called Level 3 data, and any merchant can choose to provide it for a reduction in the transaction fees they pay. Here's a small comment thread from a few months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41213632

So in essence the merchant pays with my data?

In theory you’re already paying the merchant fee in the “price”. So merchant found a way to improve margins and credit card companies found a new revenue source

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

#406

Post by xyzal »

I would like to bring attention to this project. They aim to function in an application firewall like manner and manage to block connections by category, classified by domain name. Android only though, and the 'full' version is available only on f-droid due to some anti-adblock-like Play store policy. https://trackercontrol.org/

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

#407

Post by conductr »

inahga wrote: post #6

There are quite a few interesting tracking flows out there. My rent is paid through a company called Bilt. I discovered that when I shop at Walgreens now, Bilt sends me an email containing the full receipt of what I bought like so: > Hey [inahga], > > You shopped at Walgreens on 12/1/24 and earned Bilt Points with your > Neighborhood Pharmacy benefit. > > Items eligible for rewards > TOSTITOS HINT OF LIME RSTC 11OZ >…

What’s most strange to me is why this Bilt company would pay for that data feed and somehow think it provides some value to you. It’s obviously just creepy way of saying we know too much about you

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

#408

Post by mathieuh »

whatshisface wrote: post #277
codazoda wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m relatively sure they would bring the hammer down on the sender.

What hammer? It's legal, that's the problem.

To use a line sometimes attributed to Beria, “give me the man and I will give you the case against him”. By which I mean that I’m sure they will find some means of making you sorry.

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

#409

Post by stavros »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #187
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…

Honestly, kudos. The rules should apply to the ones foisting this system upon us as well. This is probably the only way to make anyone in power reconsider current setup. And people laughed at Red Reddington when he said he had no email.

Where do you buy their details from?

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

#410

Post by noja »

wkat4242 wrote: post #312
taneq wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or because they were tricked. eg. LinkedIn’s “Connect with your contacts” onboarding step which sounds like it’ll check your contacts against existing LinkedIn users but actually spam invites anyone on your contact list that doesn’t have an account.

Linkedin is so terribly evil these days. I also see the shenanigans of adding new 'privacy' settings and setting them open by default. Another typical Microsoft ploy by the way.

They were evil before.

Previously they’d take your LinkedIn password and try using that to log in to your email account to grab your contacts.

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