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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

#491

Post by ForHackernews »

quantified wrote: post #39
quacked wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doing things because they increase some non-monetary value has fallen out of fashion for sure. A colleague of mine recently shared, in a group social setting, a sense of disappointment that his daughter was studying to be a doctor. I was, as far as I could tell, the only one to note that there is practical utility to having doctors. But the "be part of our mission" was shown to be hollow over and over too. First and…

Aren't doctors extraordinarily well-paid? Was this outside the US?

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

#492

Post by secondcoming »

casenmgreen wrote: post #466
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…

I stopped keeping a mobile number many years ago. Phone is wifi only. In particular, I do not use the contacts functionality built into the phone. (This is /e/OS, which helps, but I'll be moving to Mobian as soon as it is viable.)

How do you do online banking?

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

#493

Post by nottorp »

jlokier wrote: post #477
swiftcoder wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much all companies are doing the privacy violations. You think your doctors office doesn't sell their contact list?

Where I live, which is not in the USA, I'm confident my doctor's office doesn't sell their contact list - or at least, not without statistical anonymisation and aggregation for research purposes. They probably outsource processing the data and storing it to other entities, but that will be under contracts which govern how the data may be used and handled. I assume that's not what "sell the data" means in this convers…

Also "not in the USA" i actually work on a medical ish application these days (not the in production version, mind but a fork with new features that's entirely separate at the moment).

I have access to ... zero patient data. Our entire test database is synthetic records.

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

#496

Post by Vinnl »

speleding wrote: post #457
emsixteen wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, thanks, I've configured that for kids and other loved ones. But I can't pick up anything else, even sales people from India manage to use a number that appears local (in The Netherlands for me), so I might miss a call from the kid's school.

Oh wow, I knew this was a rampant problem in the US, but I didn't realise we had that at that scale here in the Netherlands as well. Hoping I can dodge the bullet a little longer...

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

#497

Post by ignoramous »

sriacha wrote: post #366
ignoramous wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most that a network administrator can do to prevent this is configure firewall IP blocklists of known DoH servers ... A firewall (which must also host a resolver) can choose to block requests to IPs it hasn't resolved domain names for. This is something I implemented for an Android firewall app I co-develop; it works nicely enough.

what app?

https://github.com/celzero/rethink-app

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

#499

Post by blueflow »

ErigmolCt wrote: post #425
sizzle wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They’ve basically turned every phone into a tracking beacon

I'm sure there is a choir of "told you so"-singers somewhere.

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

#500

Post by juanani »

Aurornis wrote: post #280
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…

> (this is usually successful, but can backfire badly -- CashApp terminated my account for this shenanigans) When I was at a medium-sized consumer-facing company whose name you’d recognize if you’re in the tech space (intentionally vague) we had some customers try this. They’d find product managers or directors on LinkedIn then start trying to contact them with phone numbers found on the internet, personal email addr…

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