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

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

#461

Post by adulion »

qingcharles wrote: post #156

One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do. As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd. And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketp…

I have done this as well. I once got an travel insurance claim rejected by some outsourced handler and found out who the CEO of the insurance startup was. I emailed him and magically it got resolved

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

#462

Post by stavros »

qingcharles wrote: post #453
stavros wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you buy their details from?

Right now, my goto is signalhire

Thank you, though I have a feeling that they get their data from their own sign up form.

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

#463

Post by aucisson_masque »

adeon wrote: post #297
aucisson_masque wrote: post #263

I paid for pcapdroid, it's a network monitoring app that use the vpn protocol on Android to monitor every packet sent, register which app made the request, to whom, dates and so on. In it's paid feature, you can select app to block internet connection or you can select country, ip and host. After browsing my internet logs, it shocked me to see some app I had absolutely no idea were spying so much. Xiaomi home ? Yeah…

If you have the equipment (e.g. a spare Linux computer and WiFi router) and know-how, you can set up something like mitmproxy (looks very similar feature set to the Android App, but likely requires more effort to set up) to your home network. That's what I did some weeks ago, and then basically the same exercise you did (just my whole network instead of just phone), looking what's going on. And yeah...it's not good.…

Well I believe it's Feasible.

Anyway like most things it's a journey, not an on off switch. First you get aware then you make change and the situation gets better, it doesn't have to be perfect to be better.

On my Android phone, I had to make clear cut on which app I could keep after seeing the logs. The apps from Google, microsoft, amazon they are all gone. Even the play services and the play store replaced with aurora.

It cuts at least 2/3 of the network requests.

Then you have the case of individual apps that use Facebook SDK or other advertiser, there are often alternatives in the open source community and when it's not the case there are always less privacy invasive alternative on the store.

For instance, my default Samsung weather app was sending lots and lots of data. The alternative on the froid were not in my taste.

I eventually found out about weawow, it's not open source but it doesn't require any weird permission, no ads, it's not constantly sending data in the background and my logs says it only connect to weather.weawow.com.

I mean it's fine.

After spending weeks with the firewall, i was able to identify the spying app and replace most of them. My network log now is pretty empty when I'm not using the phone.

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

#464

Post by jagermo »

lostlogin wrote: post #248
jeanlucas wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this was tried by the likes of James Oliver and journalists/comedians of that caliber running ads and gathering data from politicians in Washington. It was some years ago and resulted in nothing

Do you mean John Oliver?

or Jamie Olive Oil?

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

#465

Post by nedt »

mickgardner wrote: post #269

I find it fascinating reading hacker news, full of IT folk who simultaneously build software that enables and profits from the advertising and personal information selling & tracking industry - are also the same people who complain the loudest about it. Unbelievable.

We might not be the same. Every time someone asks for tracking anything I complain and question a lot. People hate me, but if there is no real use case for storing all information we can get I will veto as much as I can.

The IT folks working in the advertising industry are much more the "who cares, everyone has all our data already anyway".

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

#466

Post by casenmgreen »

qingcharles wrote: post #156

One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do. As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd. And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketp…

I stopped keeping a mobile number many years ago.

Phone is wifi only.

In particular, I do not use the contacts functionality built into the phone.

(This is /e/OS, which helps, but I'll be moving to Mobian as soon as it is viable.)

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

#467

Post by croes »

gruez wrote: post #177
qingcharles wrote: post #156

One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do. As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd. And I buy this stuff. Every time I need customer service and I'm getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketp…

>One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do. >As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd. Fortunately this is changing with iOS 18 with "limited contacts" sharing. https://mobiledevmemo.com/wp-cont…

Doesn’t help against your cousin who shares your data.

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

#468

Post by nedt »

atum47 wrote: post #249

Reddit app has no permissions on my phone, but the feed suggests communities based on my location never the less. I've been traveling for the last two months, every city I've been has been suggested

Just check https://ipinfo.io/ to see how close your IP points to your location. For most targeted content the city is good enough. And honestly if I'm one of 1 million people it's ok.

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

#469

Post by nedt »

Einenlum wrote: post #418
Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #416

By "location", the OP means country. So not exactly a GPS point to 6 decimals... This is the second time I've seen a post with this problem here.

There's also, latitude, longitude and IP.

But that latitude and longitude might still be the middle of some city or country and not an exact location. It's not really clear how close it is.

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

#470

Post by K0nserv »

nomilk wrote: post #403

> Advertising Tracking ID was actually set to 000000-0000... because I "Asked app not to track". > I checked this by manually disabling and enabling tracking option for the Stack app and comparing requests in both cases. > And that's the only difference between allowing and disallowing tracking This is revealing! I'd wondered about Apple's curious wording " Ask App not to track" leaves suspicious wriggle room - apps…

Apple sets Advertising Tracking ID to 00000-0000 because it's the only technical control they have. However, apps are also supposed to respect the signal with regards to other methods of cross-site/app tracking and disable fingerprinting mechanisms.

See https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-... for details

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