[flagged]
Is it just me or is this an AI comment?
CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
201–210 of 217 posts
Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
#202> What You Can Do To Protect Yourself > 1. Disable your mobile advertising ID > 2. Review apps you’ve granted location permissions to. I'm surprised they missed the most important step, which is blocking the advertisers from collecting your data in the first place. This is easily done in the browser with uBlock Origin and system-wide with DNS filtering.
How do you do the system wide DNS filtering?
Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
#203I 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…
> unless you give them a key to match you across apps Eg by running standard Android? That doesn't have eg secure app spawning, so apps can profile app initialisation data AIUI And probably 10 other things behind the scenes that GrapheneÓS plugs?
Exactly, people are going to be logged into these apps with trackable identifiers. You can see it with tracker control on android, download a new app and see existing apps report things to new trackers, which seems to be happening at the sdk level.
Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
#204> What You Can Do To Protect Yourself > 1. Disable your mobile advertising ID > 2. Review apps you’ve granted location permissions to. I'm surprised they missed the most important step, which is blocking the advertisers from collecting your data in the first place. This is easily done in the browser with uBlock Origin and system-wide with DNS filtering.
How do you do the system wide DNS filtering?
pihole is one way, though it's tricky to do it right
Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
#205I 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…
You're right, individually, we don't have the power to protect ourselves, especially passively. Call your lawmakers. Call any lawmaker who will listen. You probably have a primary election coming up soon. Ask the candidates what their stance is on this & make an informed vote. If they aren't sure, explain the situation to them. Do the same in November.
Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
#206There’s literally a flock camera at basically every street location that one suburb borders another where I live. There’s really not any legal practical way to avoid ALPRs. I’m pretty sure the government knows where I am 24/7. I’m not going to worry about targeted advertising by the government anymore and just worry about it the people reselling it to non-governments for use.
Weird take. Lots of examples recently of municipalities taking down Flock cameras. It's not a lost cause.
I think it’s possible in large cities, but seems unlikely that all small suburbs in an area you can get each suburb and some are very small to remove them. And that is just “possible” in large cities not reality. Who has the time to go from small locality to small locality.
Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
#207I 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…
> Each SDK might be tattling on you, but unless you give them a key to match you across apps, each signal from each app is unique
Aren't there many examples of these? For example IMEI, IMSI, phone number, etc?
Even without "unique" signals, isn't it fairly trivial to identify a user with a handful of "not very unique" signals? User-agent, a few recent IP addresses, browser capabilities, list of installed apps, device operating system properties, etc?
Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither the government nor an ad agency needs to know where I am, no matter how "rough" the data is. It's none of their business.
The government does need to know where the people building their lives on breaking the law are. Don't think CBP wants to know where you are.
The government wants to know that. They don't need to know.
CPB doesn't care where I am. Unless they make a mistake and think I'm an illegal immigrant. Or they decide to teach a lesson to someone who's critical of them.
Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
That location information is not available to apps or ad networks without user consent. The government can access it from the carrier with a warrant, but that's not what we're discussing here.
Couldn't you just maintain a list of cell tower IPs and figure it out with traceroute?
IP doesn't handle roaming very well. If you got routed onto the internet directly from your local cell tower, then your connections would drop whenever you switched to a different tower, which is somewhat suboptimal. Cell networks handle it at a lower level and route your traffic through a central location which serves as the origin of your IP traffic. Geolocate your IP while on cell data and you'll probably see something pretty far away from where you are. My phone's IP address at the moment is about 400 miles away from the actual phone.
Re: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
There definitely is and I've definitely pitched it to places. The Intercept had interest but told me that they wanted me to build the story out more to be less focused on Chicago. I understand where they were coming from (and the others who said the same thing) but it wasn't possible for me to continue doing freelance work, so no stories ended up being published about it at all.