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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

#431

Post by speleding »

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…

As a result of sales drones getting hold of my number, I have to put my phone on silent and never pick up unless I recognize the number. Very unfortunate. What if there is an emergency with my kids?

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

#432

Post by claw-el »

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.

I believe some apps actually have to automatically brighten up your screen when displaying a QR code for scanning, and then reduce back the brightness of its previous setting when moving out of the QR code. I believe the Whole Foods app does this for its first screen.

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

#433

Post by pandemic_region »

Related: has anyone else noticed the practice of using cheap commodity 'living room' appliances to get access to your data? A while ago I bought a ceiling light for my daughters' bedroom, brand unknown to me. It had a built-in speaker controlled via bluetooth, and dozens of light patterns and colors it could emit via a ring of small leds. My daughter was extactic looking at the youtube promo vid. Turned out that to use any of these features, you needed to install their app. Fine okay installing. Then the app demanded access to contacts and camera or it refused to connect to the ceiling light. Fine okay uninstalling the app and returning that crap.

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

#435

Post by naniwaduni »

sfink wrote: post #380
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> 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. In what way? A discount for allowing surveillance is identical to an extra charge for disallowing it. They're identical, unless the "base" rate is set externally somehow. $5 for lemonade, $3 off if you skip the lemon == $2 for sugar wate…

Defaults matter.

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

#436

Post by emaro »

claw-el wrote: post #432
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.

I believe some apps actually have to automatically brighten up your screen when displaying a QR code for scanning, and then reduce back the brightness of its previous setting when moving out of the QR code. I believe the Whole Foods app does this for its first screen.

Surely that could be done without sending the brightness to some 3rd party.

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

#437

Post by Arech »

[emotions redacted]

Long ago there was XPrivacy project for Android that allowed to granularly set permissions for each app & system service and ensure they won't get the real private data. It's no longer alive these days, I guess. Can someone share their experience with the alternatives for the modern latest Android?

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

#438

Post by emsixteen »

speleding wrote: post #431
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…

As a result of sales drones getting hold of my number, I have to put my phone on silent and never pick up unless I recognize the number. Very unfortunate. What if there is an emergency with my kids?

If you're using iOS you can set certain contacts to bypass silent mode so that you still hear their notifications/calls. I know it doesn't help with unknown numbers, but just saying in case you're not aware. I'd be surprised if you can't do the same on Android.

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

#439

Post by cauefcr »

bruce511 wrote: post #401
otteromkram wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AWS was, indeed, very easy to reach when i did an oopsie and spent over my desired limit.

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

#440

Post by saagarjha »

dkga wrote: post #426
noja wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn#Use_of_e-mail_account...
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