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CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

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Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

#191

Post by 3RTB297 »

trinsic2 wrote: post #135
jmward01 wrote: post #120

I am evolving my views on personal privacy. I am, like many people, trying to passively defend myself. However, the environment today is more akin to people coming up and punching you than it is to just avoiding door to door sales people. We are being actively attacked, and real harm is being caused. People are loosing their entire livelihoods, or worse, to attacks on their privacy like this. At the moment all I see…

Im not sure I understand your point. You can still work to protect your privacy and it will get better slowly over time IMHO. There are services out their that help you with the data that is already out there on you.

We're at a place where browser fingerprinting is what you have to defeat in order to not be tracked online, it goes a lot further than signing up for DeleteMe.

All DeleteMe does is save you the time of manually making takedown requests, which is not that onerous in the first place. I've done plenty of my own. But that doesn't prevent online advertising databases from profiling me or you. And it's been happening for years - this isn't new at all.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ad...

Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

#192

Post by danaris »

notnullorvoid wrote: post #42
legitster wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, your device is not giving anyone your location without explicit permission. So it really just comes down to your IP Address, which services do need.

IP Address is all you need to get fairly accurate (town or neighborhood) location for most of North America. But it is necessary to send it somewhere, otherwise the internet wouldn't work. Unfortunately it seems to have become accepted for our devices to communicate constantly and often with services we never explicitly started communication with (like Ad networks used in Apps). Permission systems on devices should c…

That would be great—for about 0.3% of us, those who both care about privacy and have the knowledge and time to go through those sorts of listings.

No; what we need is to ban this data collection entirely.

Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

#194

Post by arghwhat »

chaps wrote: post #101
legitster wrote: post #16

I work with Ad Data a lot in my job, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what this data that journalists love to propogate: The location data in these networks is very inaccurate. Your OS and browser actually do a pretty good job of locking down your location data unless you give explicit permission. It's in the ad network's interests to lie about the quality of their data - so a lot of the "location" data is g…

I worked in ad-tech for a year before I left the tech industry as a whole. I've also done a fair bit of investigative journalism. Let me share a thing: Factual, a company that specializes in hyperlocal geofencing, uses geofencing much smaller than the self-regulation that their industry allows in their own rules. I learned this after a coworker quit because our company was allowing ad targeting to people using these…

First thing would be that a small geofence (i.e., a narrow church on available data) is entirely orthogonal to having high precision, high quality location data available.

I won't claim with certainty that this is the case, but it seems likely that Factual was overselling their capabilities. That, or they relied specifically on having users grant high precision location data access and had nothing otherwise.

Apps that already need location data are probably the most likely sources of collecting such data - food apps, dating apps, chat apps you have sent your location in, ...

Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

#195

Post by 3RTB297 »

A week after I started doing OSINT research, I realized how much very personal data I had online. Much more than I wanted. Years ago I went down the privacy rabbit hole and realized how bad all of this was. And that was before it took off around 2019 and really ramped up a year ago.

It's not uncommon, but always disappointing to me, to see how out of touch most HN folks are when it comes to privacy and data. Usually privacy is dismissed as hyperbole, or tinfoil hat stuff, or only for people selling drugs on the darknet. It's not anymore. The minimum barrier to entry for simply not having your every thought and whim and search catalogued is high: Masking your IP address, masking your browser fingerprint, and simply not participating in a lot of parts of the internet.

These are your thoughts, your personal life, being dissected and catalogued and sold in an attempt to, at BEST, shape your behavior. At worst, see exactly when you cross the line into becoming "an agitator." It's the step you need before getting to "thoughtcrime." Why is this acceptable to anyone??? In exchange for free email?

We're all in the pot and the water is already starting to bubble. And I'm sure that the only replies I might get will be "Oh, but no, it's not anything like that." Sure.

This is simply the first time you're seeing it on US soil. https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ad...

Yet two years ago, look how many people were incredulous, doubtful, or simply didn't care. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540738

Maybe now is a good time to bring up KOSA? Or maybe we should discuss that two years from now when it's too late to change anything.

https://www.eff.org/document/kids-online-safety-act-kosa https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/kids-online-safety-act...

Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

#196

Post by vvanpo »

chaps wrote: post #121
gruez wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Please try to reconcile with what your industry has and continues to destroy. I don't see anything contradictory between your comment and the OP. Having an amoral CEO who condones breaking geotargeting self-regulation doesn't contradict OP's claim that it's hard to tie geotargeting data in bidstreams back to a particular person.

Sure, hard. But, um, lots of things are hard. For example, it was very hard for me to identify myself in an anonymized public dataset of vehicle trips, but I did. It was also hard to FOIA for the documents showing them writing SQL to spot my trip.. but I did. Hard doesn't mean impossible.

It sounds like there is a story here, have you written about this somewhere?

Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

#197

Post by evolighting »

privacy data it self is merely the case;

The real problem is that tech giants only need to claim that their use of data is appropriate, and they can then feel free to use it to provide "better" services.

After all, they should never have been allowed to do this from the very beginning. Users aren't fools—they can learn too. So what we need isn't automatic push, but easier ways to actively seek things out.

Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

#198

Post by Terr_ »

drnick1 wrote: post #164
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you do realize your cellphone is constantly sharing your location with your cell phone company which is more than willing to give it to the government without a warrant. Whatever you are doing is meaningless privacy theatre

I wouldn't call that meaningless privacy theater. For one, you can buy a SIM anonymously, and make the cell location data essentially useless. Second, protection at the DNS level prevents other types of data exfiltration (such as cross-site tracking by the Meta Pixel). By not using social media and communicating over secure apps like Signal, you can indeed achieve a high degree of resistance against tracking and prof…

> you can buy a SIM anonymously, and make the cell location data essentially useless

Even ignoring the first part, which will vary by country, I think that represents a failure of imagination.

For example, how many other people-with-phones have a pattern of spending 5+ nighttime hours within 100m of your home, and spending 5+ workday hours within 100m of your office?

Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

#200

Post by giantg2 »

kube-system wrote: post #97
giantg2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! This looks like what I want

Cape is another option, supposedly a more complete tech stack of their own

Yeah, I saw them, but they are pretty expensive for me. The rotating IMSI and two additional numbers seems cool. But I think for me if it were anything that sensitive I would use an E2E encrypted call/text service since Cape calls and texts are only M2E encrypted.

Just not retaining everything forever and selling it seems like a good start for my personal use.

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