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The government uses targeted advertising to track your location

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Re: The government uses targeted advertising to track your location

#71

Post by Retric »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #52
Retric wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How things are aren’t the only way things could be. A receiver could use a new random ID to call “collect” to a secure third party network which agrees to pay for the base stations bandwidth for every connection. The station then responds to the base station yep ID X’s bandwidth will be paid by vert tel. Obviously, this doesn’t eliminate the possibility of tracking as you’d want the cell to have multiple connections…

GP is referring to manufacturing variance in the radio equipment, not the deliberately-inserted tracking identifiers. See, for example, doi:10.1016/j.dsp.2025.105201 and doi:10.3390/rs17152659 for relatively cheap approaches. The solution to this is just to make it illegal to store and process the results of such analysis applied to radio signals, without consent of the data subject (GDPR jurisdictions have that alre…

Intentional noise can obstruct that signal. Which should be obvious from a pure information theory perspective, if you can extract more information from a transmission to identify the radio a transmitter could modulate that to carry information.

Re: The government uses targeted advertising to track your location

#74

Post by ux266478 »

Retric wrote: post #71
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP is referring to manufacturing variance in the radio equipment, not the deliberately-inserted tracking identifiers. See, for example, doi:10.1016/j.dsp.2025.105201 and doi:10.3390/rs17152659 for relatively cheap approaches. The solution to this is just to make it illegal to store and process the results of such analysis applied to radio signals, without consent of the data subject (GDPR jurisdictions have that alre…

Intentional noise can obstruct that signal. Which should be obvious from a pure information theory perspective, if you can extract more information from a transmission to identify the radio a transmitter could modulate that to carry information.

Even going to the extreme of a friendly jammer producing a countersignal is only enough to fool the bottom end of hobbyists. The only thing you can do to stop SEI to a certainty is to trash a radio after you've used it once. It's an unsolvable problem outside of that, and known as such for decades.

Re: The government uses targeted advertising to track your location

#75

Post by Retric »

ux266478 wrote: post #74
Retric wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intentional noise can obstruct that signal. Which should be obvious from a pure information theory perspective, if you can extract more information from a transmission to identify the radio a transmitter could modulate that to carry information.

Even going to the extreme of a friendly jammer producing a countersignal is only enough to fool the bottom end of hobbyists. The only thing you can do to stop SEI to a certainty is to trash a radio after you've used it once. It's an unsolvable problem outside of that, and known as such for decades.

I’ve read papers saying otherwise. In real world conditions when you’re trying to track moving transmitters, we are talking about an extremely difficult to detect signal and you’re trying to accurately identify an extremely large number of devices.

Re: The government uses targeted advertising to track your location

#76

Post by HerbManic »

curt15 wrote: post #61
HerbManic wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im probably to last person to defend the entire stack that is the smart phone but this feels a little reductionist. I use mine as a phone, messaging, podcast player, camera, a banking device, a little email and occastionally the web. Thats it. Some convience is good, too much is very bad. No social media or whatever millions of apps they constantly try to push in your store of (enforced) choice. In someways we have d…

>For instance my bank has become entirely dependent of their app as the glue between all their functions and authorisation That sounds horrible. What are users to do if their smartphone breaks?

In my case a few weeks back when my phone failed, it meant no access over the weekend until I could get a very lengthy phone call to reinstate app access on a new phone.

Re: The government uses targeted advertising to track your location

#77

Post by landscape5497 »

everdrive wrote: post #3

It's never popular when I post this, but I'm just going to do it again: "No matter the risk, I must carry my smartphone everywhere and install every app. It would be unimaginable to have the urge to look something up, but then wait to do it later until I'm using a real computer. No negative outcome will EVER shake my deep, permanent need to carry a smartphone all the time and use it for as much as possible." We've do…

> No matter the risk

People don’t necessarily know the risk. Some do, and as someone on HackerNews you are in a space of such people who are more likely to know, but I don’t think the average person knows just how deep risks go.

> We've done this to ourselves, and we're terrified at even the most minor inconvenience

> It's baffling.

> I am quite angry and perplexed at why people have backed themselves into this corner

I don’t think this framing is quite right. It puts the onus of the problem onto the people and solely frames it as something people do, leaving out anything else. I don’t know if that’s how you meant it, but that’s how it comes off.

It’s baffling that people would push themselves into the corner because that’s not the full story. At least in part, they are being pushed into that corner; it’s not just something they do but something being done to them.

That’s what marketing, and at least some aspects of design, are. A company wants people to know about and use their product, and they want people to keep on using their product. Taken farther along, this leads to desires becoming needs or addictions. This can happen with many technologies, products, etc., phones included.

I don’t think it’s as baffling that people are drawn towards using a product excessively when there are millions to billions of dollars alongside time and effort put towards getting people to go down that path

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