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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

#421

Post by Lio »

gruez wrote: post #41
inetknght wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just use cash/certified check from now on You might want to discover about sophistication and pervasive facial recognition technology used by major retailers. Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For "fraud prevention", of course.

>Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For "fraud prevention", of course. They can already track you through your phone and/or credit cards. Why bother setting up a massive facial recognition system for people paying with cash when they only account for 10% (or whatever) of overall shoppers, and have less disposable income than average?

I don’t know about the US but in the UK they did it ostensibly to catch shoplifters.

We have a major problem with “professional” thieves stealing because the big chains don’t want to pay cashiers anymore.

You see a screen with your face on it in places like Waitrose self service checkouts now. It’s their way of saying “we know who you are”.

Tracking cash purchases is just a side bonus for them.

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

#422

Post by ErigmolCt »

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…

So your data is only as private as the least privacy-conscious person in your social circle.

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

#423

Post by 55555 »

noja wrote: post #410
wkat4242 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sounds absolutely insane.

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

#424

Post by ErigmolCt »

theptip wrote: post #35

> Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones? This is clearly adding entropy to de-anonymize users between apps, rather than to add specificity to ad bids.

Combine this with IP, timestamp, and some behavioral patterns, and you’ve got an extremely robust tracking mechanism that operates outside of explicit consent mechanisms.

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

#425

Post by ErigmolCt »

sizzle wrote: post #344
theptip wrote: post #35

> Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones? This is clearly adding entropy to de-anonymize users between apps, rather than to add specificity to ad bids.

Straight up fingerprinting us without consent it’s pure insanity.

They’ve basically turned every phone into a tracking beacon

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

#426

Post by dkga »

noja wrote: post #410
wkat4242 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a big thing, is there any evidence? Not implausible unfortunately…

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

#427

Post by ErigmolCt »

ggm wrote: post #349

The thing I found I grokked, and think is important from this article is that private browsing doesn't end this information flow. It only marks the JSON data blob as "asked not to be identified or collated" and its substantively an honour system. There are penalties (lawsuit against google for misleading people on the fact data was still collected) but the walls to breach here are low, given that non-PII can be cross…

"Private browsing" is just a polite request for companies to pretend they didn’t see you before

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

#428

Post by troupo »

kortilla wrote: post #219
throw_away32 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The point is that no effort was made to implement a technical solution to protect privacy.

And you want the government to do that?

Why haven't the companies who at every turn shout how privacy conscious they are haven't done that?

It's now been 8 years of GDPR. Why hasn't the world's largest advertising company incidentally owning the world's most popular browser implemented a technical solution for tracking and cookie banners in the browser? Oh wait...

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

#429

Post by WA »

gruez wrote: post #177
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…

>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…

Useless without limiting the kind of data I want to share per contact. iOS asks for relationships for example. You can set up your spouse, your kids, have your address or any address associated with contacts. If I want to restrict app access to contacts, I also want to restrict app access to specific contact details.

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

#430

Post by jjcob »

ryandrake wrote: post #322
dylan604 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Such "go away" screens are in violation of Apple's AppStore rules. You cannot make a permission a condition of using the app, and stop the user from using it if they don't grant that permission. The app should gracefully do as much as it possibly can without the permission.

Try signing in in any Google app without allowing data sharing with Safari. It's not possible. They don't let you.

It's kind of weird that Apple introduced this big fat tracking consent popup, but they don't really do anything to actually prevent cross-app tracking...

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