Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Privacy: Is That iPhone?

foundation.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 188 posts

Re: Privacy: Is That iPhone?

#171

Post by catalogia »

rimliu wrote: post #136
krtkush wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. The intention may have been to avoid abrupt power downs but their implementation also made sure people upgraded their devices rather than buy a new battery because most people would never be able to imagine that a device could be slow because of a bad battery. This, IMO, was a dark pattern. A sudden power down would be clear indicator that something is wrong with the device while a gradual slow d…

Ok, you have a phone that got slower, but works. And you got phone which just switches off randomly. Which one are you more likely to replace sooner?

I'd get the battery replaced and use it for another five years.

Re: Privacy: Is That iPhone?

#172

Post by godelski »

milankragujevic wrote: post #110
godelski wrote: post #46

> Phone users can currently disable the IDFA, but have to do so manually; Android users aren’t even given this option This actually false. You can change your Ad ID on Android. I just looked (and checked)If you go to Settings > Privacy > Ads you can see this IDFA. At the top (it looks like a header and not an option, so I will not fully fault Mozilla because this is a dark pattern) it says "Reset advertising ID". If…

I interpreted Mozilla's claim that Android users cannot disable the advertising identifier, but can reset it. The sentence talks about periodic resetting. I might be wrong in the intention of the author(s), but that is my interpretation.

I definitely read it differently. But I can see your interpretation. Though it gets to my question about what the opt out means. Does this mean that apps don't see it? Or does it just ask that apps don't use it. Because those are two very different things. I was hoping someone on HN would know.

Re: Privacy: Is That iPhone?

#173

Post by godelski »

freedomben wrote: post #104
godelski wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm also using a Pixel 2. So the good news is that this exists if you upgrade. I didn't realize root was not available on 10 (this is the first phone I haven't rooted and so I haven't been keeping up)

Root isn't available on on a Pixel 2 on Android 10? I also haven't upgraded yet but was going to, though that's a deal breaker for me. That said my light googling hasn't turned up verification of this yet. Root does work just fine on Android 10 on the OnePlus 7 Pro (which is the best phone I've ever owned).

Well thanks for verifying. I'm not sure what the gp meant then. When my phone runs into EOL I plan on rooting it again so I can keep getting updates.

Re: Privacy: Is That iPhone?

#174

Post by godelski »

dredmorbius wrote: post #111
godelski wrote: post #46

> Phone users can currently disable the IDFA, but have to do so manually; Android users aren’t even given this option This actually false. You can change your Ad ID on Android. I just looked (and checked)If you go to Settings > Privacy > Ads you can see this IDFA. At the top (it looks like a header and not an option, so I will not fully fault Mozilla because this is a dark pattern) it says "Reset advertising ID". If…

This is not available (at least not at that, or other obvious settings areas) on a huge number of Android devices. Knowing where and when this was added to Android would be helpful.

This is actually really interesting to me. That versions would be so different. I assumed you tried the other paths that other users noted? What phone are you using? Android version?

Re: Privacy: Is That iPhone?

#175

Post by DavideNL »

v3v3 wrote: post #165
DavideNL wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, unfortunately there's not a single item in there containing/related to Google :'(

You need to have at least 2 apps installed from Google for it to show up.

I installed the Youtube and Google Home apps.

However, still i see no "Google LLC" in "Settings > General > iPhone Storage".

(i do see Youtube and Google Home. But after deleting them and reinstalling Youtube i am automatically logged in again.)

Re: Privacy: Is That iPhone?

#176

Post by jolux »

oil25 wrote: post #34

Anyone disillusioned by the thought that Apple values privacy would be well served by reading iOS, The Future Of macOS, Freedom, Security And Privacy In An Increasingly Hostile Global Environment - https://gist.github.com/iosecure/357e724811fe04167332ef54e73... There is so much more to privacy than is made apparent to the user as a few OS knobs to "limit" ad tracking.

Seems to be at least a few things wrong there. It’s completely false that iOS doesn’t have full-device encryption, for example.

Edit: I’m going to revise this and say that having read the whole thing there is very little of substance other than “Apple has a ton of metadata about your devices” at all, and the author doesn’t do a good job of quantifying the impact of that information exposure. On top of that, they cite iOS being closed source as a reason for its purported insecurity. Honestly the part about not having FDE is enough to make me question their competence more broadly.

Re: Privacy: Is That iPhone?

#177

Post by jolux »

saagarjha wrote: post #129
mariojv wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saved this writeup for future reference, thanks. Agreed that privacy needs more analysis than trusting a few rather opaque OS knobs. I am a little skeptical about some of the claims in that gist, though. One example is when they claim that APNS pushes require app access to a globally unique iOS activation identifier. That seems false. According to Apple’s dev docs at least, those tokens are device-and-app specific an…

> On iOS, there is no full-disk or full-volume encryption, only varying levels of file-based encryption, partially dependent on third-party developer choices, such that what is, and isn’t, encrypted (with encryption tied to the user passphrase) is not always clear to the end-user. I'm not sure about this, either; all recent iOS devices have a DMA AES engine that performs encryption on anything that travels between st…

Yeah, that’s completely and obviously fucking wrong and makes me question this person’s skills to be honest.

Re: Privacy: Is That iPhone?

#178

Post by tinus_hn »

mrgreenfur wrote: post #167
mobjack wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need an IDFA to track someone in the same app. You can generate your own UUID to use. The value of the IDFA comes from coordinating user behavior across apps. Targeting ads is one use case, but it is also used in conversion tracking, which is very valuable to advertisers. They can know if ads in one app resulted in people buying things in another app. Edit: fixed typo

Generating your own UUID is forbidden I thought? What if apple sandboxed it to each app to make it safer/easier?

You can’t look through device identifiers like the MAC address or the serial to create ids.

Re: Privacy: Is That iPhone?

#179

Post by varenc »

shermozle wrote: post #83
varenc wrote: post #40

Mozilla suggests resetting the IDFA once per month...but that seems pretty trivial to workaround? If an app you used previously starts up and sees that your IDFA changed, it's easy for that app to know that the old IDFA and the new IDFA refer to the same user! This tracking is all possible because iOS gives every app on the device the same IDFA (advertising identifier [1]). They can then correlate all your activity a…

There is in fact just such an identifier, it's called IDFV. ID For Vendor. It's shared between all apps from the same vendor, so your Facebook and Instagram apps know they're on the same device. Apple used to be quite strict that you had to actually have advertising in the app to ask for the IDFA permission. That seems to have disappeared.

That's the one I linked to right? =)

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uidevice/162...

Re: Privacy: Is That iPhone?

#180

Post by varenc »

tinus_hn wrote: post #178
mrgreenfur wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generating your own UUID is forbidden I thought? What if apple sandboxed it to each app to make it safer/easier?

You can’t look through device identifiers like the MAC address or the serial to create ids.

since iOS 7 Apple always returns "02:00:00:00:00:00" for the WLAN MAC address for this very reason.

Besides the IDFA Apples seem to have tried hard to get rid of the obvious ways for different apps to link activity between their users. Of course if you login or provide an email it becomes easy...and there's plenty of trickier less reliable ways like looking at IP address

Post reply on HN