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

timsh.org

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

#111

Post by barrkel »

dietr1ch wrote: post #70
mistrial9 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a loyalty program calling something loyalty does not make it "loyalty" ..

So called loyalty programs should be illegal on multiple fronts, - Privacy: There's obvious tracking of purchasing trends. This derails into selling user data to everyone that makes people increasingly easy to track. - Customer-dependent pricing / Price-discrimination: This is awful for economy, in econ 101 you learn that business want to charge each customer as much as they are willing to pay, but this differentiate…

Price discrimination is not a priori bad. A fixed price with enough margin to support the business may be too high for price sensitive consumers. If you can charge more to less price sensitive consumers, you can, at the margin, make a little bit on these price sensitive consumers, and overall everyone is better off - more consumers are satisfied and their marginal willingness to consume a unit of the thing being sold is more equalized.

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

#112

Post by kortilla »

anon7000 wrote: post #74
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

It’s honestly crazy that we allow companies to sell our data — and even financially incentivize companies to share our data like this.

The problem is that to you it seems like your data but to Walgreens they see it as theirs. They generated it with their point of sale system.

The data is about a transaction that you made, but they generated all of it.

Until we have agreement as a society about what “my data” means, this kind of stuff is going to run rampant.

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

#113

Post by sunnybeetroot »

timsh wrote: post #110
sunnybeetroot wrote: post #79

Whilst I trust that the author did in fact look at the data of each request eventually, the screenshot they provided of Charles could not have been of the exact requests they intercepted given Charles is indicating that those are not yet SSL proxied (except for the 2 GET requests). EDIT: please ignore, author did it differently to what I expected.

I decrypted them all by installing Charles SSL cert on the iphone. This is why the requests seem not SSL proxied.

My apologies, thank you for clarifying and thank you for the brilliant article. Have updated my comment.

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

#114

Post by jjeaff »

everdrive wrote: post #84

I'm really happy to see this level of detail and research. So many privacy-related articles either wholly lack in technical skill, or hysterically cannot differentiate between different levels of privacy concerns and risks. People commonly point to Mozilla's research regarding vehicle's privacy policies. ( https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-... ) But that research only states what the car com…

I'll answer the, "Does disabling it void your warranty?" question. The answer is almost always "no". Unless the modification you make to something actually directly or indirectly caused damage to it, companies in the US cannot "void the warranty".

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

#115

Post by kortilla »

inetknght wrote: post #26
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 >…

> 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.

Is there actual evidence of this, like anywhere?

Facial recognition on a small corpus of known faces (what everyone experiences on Facebook, their phones, etc) is an easy problem.

Walmart picking up a face walking into a store and matching it against 30 million possibilities is going to return so many false positive matches it’s going to be completely useless.

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

#116

Post by jkaplowitz »

gruez wrote: post #22
andrewfromx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bilt Members can earn points on Walgreens purchases made using any card linked to their Bilt account." https://support.biltrewards.com/hc/en-us/articles/2901187842... There's that FSA/HSA benefit section at the bottom which explicitly states that Bilt receives item-level data: https://www.biltrewards.com/terms/walgreens

That just sounds like a standard cross-merchant loyalty program? I don't think there are many examples in the US, but once you realize it's a loyalty program you really shouldn't be surprised that they're tracking your purchase history. That's basically the entire premise.

In Germany, the major cross-merchant loyalty program Payback gives you one or two rounds of extra consent choices about the tracking, and the type we see here is absolutely not mandatory for participating. It does of course let them give you more personalized and useful coupons, but one can participate while declining that permission.

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

#117

Post by jkaplowitz »

barrkel wrote: post #111
dietr1ch wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So called loyalty programs should be illegal on multiple fronts, - Privacy: There's obvious tracking of purchasing trends. This derails into selling user data to everyone that makes people increasingly easy to track. - Customer-dependent pricing / Price-discrimination: This is awful for economy, in econ 101 you learn that business want to charge each customer as much as they are willing to pay, but this differentiate…

Price discrimination is not a priori bad. A fixed price with enough margin to support the business may be too high for price sensitive consumers. If you can charge more to less price sensitive consumers, you can, at the margin, make a little bit on these price sensitive consumers, and overall everyone is better off - more consumers are satisfied and their marginal willingness to consume a unit of the thing being sold…

There are ways to adequately approximate that kind of price discrimination without detailed tracking though, like giving discounts to students, seniors, and people receiving various kinds of welfare benefit upon showing proof of status.

Yeah it isn’t as accurate as the privacy-invasive kind of tracking, since students and seniors can be wealthy and eligibility for welfare benefits doesn’t always consider assets or gifts from well-off family. But it’s accurate enough to give the economy most of the same benefit without the privacy downside.

I do think it’s fine for people to opt in to more tracking as a separate consent choice beyond merely participating in a loyalty program, for example to get more personalized and therefore more useful offers, but not as a condition of participation to merely receive at least standard offers and accumulate points. That’s how they generally work in Germany.

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

#119

Post by kortilla »

nicbou wrote: post #28
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 >…

Things like that are on my mind when HN rants about GDPR. Something like this would be wildly illegal where I live.

HN rants about it because it’s not a good solution. It identified a problem but caused an idiotic fallout (cookie banners) and failed to actually put in a framework to enforce that companies aren’t just lying.

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

#120

Post by layer8 »

unification_fan wrote: post #13
dylan604 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. Eye roll on the whole “make the world better”. So few SV products remotely make the world better. The purpose of the vast majority is to make money at all costs. I also disagree with what most people claim is making the world better. All in all, I think social media is a net negative for the world for any good that might be found. Every SV thing after that is just chasing the recketship to the moon dream.

> So few SV products remotely make the world better Because devs have to eat in order to survive?

Ah, yes, the profession that most struggles to make ends meet.
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