151–160 of 263 posts
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old.reddit.com
For now but you know they’re coming for that ass.
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```Based on a binomial/Poisson distribution and a baseline of 21 million U.S. device sales per release, a fingerprint relying on "seconds since setup" fails to uniquely identify individuals. In the high-density Early Adopter phase, you will share your exact setup second with an average of 1.01 other people (a total matching pool of ~2 people). Six months into the cycle, you will still share that second with an averag…
Reminds me of a meeting I was party to with the Safari team. We worked with them on some standards stuff at an old job. They claimed to have creepy-level tracking of users back then. We were discussing how to identify users for an A/B test across millions of sites and comparing what fingerprints we could both derive to most likely end up on the same user. If you use a closed source browser. That’s the kinda shit they…
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Okay it's weird but the first thing that came to mind. Logic: if I can think of a monetisable, nefarious application in 10 seconds, then it stands to reason that very many nefarious applications would be possible with more time/effort.
Not just possible, currently being implemented. People are murdered every year using this information. Last year a US politician was assassinated by someone who tracked them by buying this information from aggregator. You thought of a tame use case!
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...wouldn't it be better to have a pocket computer you own?
It would be even better if app devs weren't pieces of shit making apps whose sole purpose is to gather all of this data to sell to other pieces of shits while skinning their app as a game or other app to trick users into thinking it's worth installing. Fighting devs being able to make money in this manner is not dissimilar to getting made a drug dealers. As long as users want their product, they will sell the product…
Yea, it's infuriating that most of the HN crowd thinks the apps are better then web. Apps can spy on you way more than web. It's the reason every website says "please download the app". If it was better for them to spy on you via the website they wouldn't ask you to download the app.
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```Based on a binomial/Poisson distribution and a baseline of 21 million U.S. device sales per release, a fingerprint relying on "seconds since setup" fails to uniquely identify individuals. In the high-density Early Adopter phase, you will share your exact setup second with an average of 1.01 other people (a total matching pool of ~2 people). Six months into the cycle, you will still share that second with an averag…
Just using IP address, device storage, device name, and similar signals, we can identify a user. It isn’t difficult to correlate these data points. Apps like Facebook also force developers to use their SDKs for even small features.
Is something similar already available for Android phones?
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GrapheneOS lets you restrict the internet access of any app on install. But yes, agreed it should be everywhere.
iOS lets you turn off data access (so outside of wifi) for apps as well, it's just not asked at install, which honestly makes sense given the demographics of iPhone users.
I don't understand why internet access isn't opt-in for apps. Preventing exfiltration would prevent much of this harm, and most apps don't have any need to access the internet in the first place. Why am I creating a GE account to read my blood pressure? At least I know it's taking advantage of me. But this is clearly abusive behavior
Because 99% of apps would request it & not function without it, desensitising users into blindly accepting it. Most apps do have a legitimate reason for accessing the internet, so a binary yes/no wouldn’t achieve much anyway. I just don’t think it’s an effective way of solving the problem.
If internet access wasn't granted by default, a lot more apps would function without it.
Many other apps wouldn't exist at all, because their only reason to exist is to spy on users.
I don't understand why internet access isn't opt-in for apps. Preventing exfiltration would prevent much of this harm, and most apps don't have any need to access the internet in the first place. Why am I creating a GE account to read my blood pressure? At least I know it's taking advantage of me. But this is clearly abusive behavior
Better yet, a tool like Little Snitch should be built into the OS. Give me a detailed log of every network requests, to which domains, with what data.