&gt; So few SV products remotely make the world betterBecause devs have to eat in order to survive?

I believe this was parodied multiple times in season 1 of Silicon Valley.

Ugh. Eye roll on the whole “make the world better”. So few SV products remotely make the world better. The purpose of the vast majority is to make money at all costs. I also disagree with what most people claim is making the world better. All in all, I think social media is a net negative for the world for any good that might be found. Every SV thing after that is just chasing the recketship to the moon dream.

Doing things because they increase some non-monetary value has fallen out of fashion for sure. A colleague of mine recently shared, in a group social setting, a sense of disappointment that his daughter was studying to be a doctor. I was, as far as I could tell, the only one to note that there is practical utility to having doctors.But the &quot;be part of our mission&quot; was shown to be hollow over and over too. First and foremost, you as an enployee are making the investors and CEO rich. The mission is usually exploiting the employee, even when it&#x27;s not exploiting the world. Employees have recognized the real social ethic (money over everything) and are just playing the same game. Which is sad.Ideally the people who see these choices would make alternative choices that will leave their grandchildren better off in the world. It has taken only a generation for the &quot;greed is good&quot; mentality to drop us into this fetid soup.

i believe there are somewhat fewer practicing freemasons in those places of layte.

American business has never cared about any of that stuff. It was always lip service.Also if you haven’t heard, the US government is currently a shit show right now run by Musk as far as employment

I think a big part of the ability of these shady companies pulling the brightest minds away from more clearly beneficial fields is that important flavors of ideology necessary to motivate people to take less lucrative work have been stripped from &quot;business&quot;. There&#x27;s a lot fewer appeals to art, history, cultural stewardship, or empire-building present in things like transportation, medicine, construction, etc. than there were in the past. Any flavor of &quot;for the glory of God&#x2F;the nation&#x2F;the People&#x2F;the Art&quot; etc. is pretty effectively stripped out of American business, and I think that&#x27;s the only kind of thing that would motivate someone who could make $250k in Adware to make $100k in something else.People are now very well-trained to look out for their own bottom line, and take jobs accordingly.

I have the same question. It did not seem easy for me to find a job where we are at least not writing malware (according to my judgement). But it&#x27;s far from making the world better :|

I work in cancer research. Some companies are there just for greed as well but at least the end product could be helpful

Shame on all of the people working on those systems. Legit companies trying to make the world better struggle to find competent people.

&gt;the police confiscated a hired gun&#x27;s iPhone and found that he ran a search on the city his victim lived in.It&#x27;s far more likely they just looked at his browser history rather than doing some skullduggery with databrokers or whatever.

I read an interesting newspaper article about how the police confiscated a hired gun&#x27;s iPhone and found that he ran a search on the city his victim lived in. It is these little digital breadcrumbs that makes life easy for the prosecution.Seriously if you are going to do illegal things never ever buy a smartphone.

It seems that they have changed their minds about surveillance back doors, after some devastating attacks, where Chinese state actors (among others) used back doors created for compliance with warrants to get in.But that was the pre-Trump NSA and FBI. Now the Chinese and the Russians just need to get some DOGE volunteer to give them whatever they want, since Elon now has root on all the government payment systems and is too undisciplined to do things in a secure way.

The world is changing fast and reasons for actions may be more complex
and interesting than you assume.Were they ever _not_ benevolent to US citizens as a whole, even if
misguided? There may be last-ditch attempts to extend benevolence to
US citizens as a takeover looms. If leaks from the Office of Personnel
Management are to be believed, then right now US government is in the
process of a soft coup, being dismantled along lines of political
loyalty. I expect those working in intelligence and law enforcement
who support democracy see the writing on the wall and will act sooner
or later.Reliable end to end encryption is an important tool for citizens of a
nation that may need to organise in a hurry. We might see new Edward
Snowden type revelations of programmes, naming key people or giving
clear advice not to trust certain US based entities or services. Civil
servants may act professionally as non-politically as they can, but in
the end, if only to protect their jobs, they&#x27;re going to come down on
the side of democracy.

&gt; What are we to think of the opposing views?They&#x27;re not homogenous organizations. Not sure about the FBI, but AFAIK the NSA has always been in an awkward spot of being split between defensive and offensive missions. It wouldn&#x27;t be particularly surprising to have one arm going &quot;you should all use encrypted messaging, it&#x27;s the most secure&quot; while the other arm is frantically trying to break or backdoor said encrypted messaging.

It’s funny how in recent headlines the NSA &amp; FBI have been saying to use secure messaging app. Yet the FBI is infamous for claiming the need for back doors into these encrypted apps. What are we to think of the opposing views? Are they really being benevolent for the citizens, or do they no longer need the back door, or do they have a back door whether intentional or not?

Related?NSA Warns iPhone and Android Users–Disable Location Tracking 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42713536">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42713536</a>Hackers Claim Breach of Location Data Giant, Threaten to Leak Data 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42627336">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42627336</a>

Indeed, the article notes that the lat&#x2F;long wasn&#x27;t &quot;GPS exact&quot;, more like &quot;postal code exact&quot;.

Doing that on the client side sounds pointless though, if you are already transmitting the ip.

How did were the apps able to collect geolocation even though location services were disabled?

That just sounds like a standard cross-merchant loyalty program? I don&#x27;t think there are many examples in the US, but once you realize it&#x27;s a loyalty program you really shouldn&#x27;t be surprised that they&#x27;re tracking your purchase history. That&#x27;s basically the entire premise.

&quot;Bilt Members can earn points on Walgreens purchases made using any card linked to their Bilt account.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.biltrewards.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;29011878427533-Neighborhood-Benefit-Pharmacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.biltrewards.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2901187842...</a>There&#x27;s that FSA&#x2F;HSA benefit section at the bottom which explicitly states that Bilt receives item-level data:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biltrewards.com&#x2F;terms&#x2F;walgreens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biltrewards.com&#x2F;terms&#x2F;walgreens</a>

Hopefully exclude? By whom? At some point, somebody has to decide it was sensitive, by what standards? Does Bilt decide to not use it after they were already sold the data? Does the aggregator after already been sold it by the harvesting seller? Does the harvesting app reduce the appeal of their data by deliberately excluding the data? Does the harvesting app care to spend the money on doing that?

&gt;Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For &quot;fraud prevention&quot;, of course.They can already track you through your phone and&#x2F;or credit cards. Why bother setting up a massive facial recognition system for people paying with cash when they only account for 10% (or whatever) of overall shoppers, and have less disposable income than average?

Are you aware of cases where it is used for more that theft prevention&#x2F;manual review of CCTV?I&#x27;m not aware of any big retailers using facial data for targeting vouchers or anything similar.Simple things like &quot;did walk through the door with a child&quot; would be pretty valuable data, yet as far as I know, nobody uses it.

Is there actual evidence of this, like anywhere?Facial recognition on a small corpus of known faces (what everyone experiences on Facebook, their phones, etc) is an easy problem.Walmart picking up a face walking into a store and matching it against 30 million possibilities is going to return so many false positive matches it’s going to be completely useless.

Facial recognition is illegal where I live, both for gov&#x27;t and commercial uses. Several major cities in the US have banned it (e.g., San Francisco, Boston, etc.).

&gt; just use cash&#x2F;certified check from now onYou might want to discover about sophistication and pervasive facial recognition technology used by major retailers. Paid by cash? It can still be tracked to you. For &quot;fraud prevention&quot;, of course.

Is there any documentation on this to read further? I.e. what the different levels contain and how much on average is the cost reduction for the merchant.

It’s honestly crazy that we allow companies to sell our data — and even financially incentivize companies to share our data like this.

Who is Level 3 data shared with, ie who is the aggregator? Is it the credit card bank then aggregates and sells it?

So in essence the merchant pays with my data?

Thanks for the details.&gt; choose to provide it for a reduction in the transaction fees they pay.That would explain why I can use my credit card for rent without a transaction fee! No free lunch!

This is called Level 3 data, and any merchant can choose to provide it for a reduction in the transaction fees they pay.Here&#x27;s a small comment thread from a few months back: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41213632">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41213632</a>

Unfortunately the GDPR is largely toothless if a company without an EU presence chooses to ignore it.I live in Ireland and my data is in the databases of several US data brokers. Thise conpanies can&#x27;t be forced to to comply with the GDPR because they simply do not have an EU presence. You don&#x27;t have to search far to find stories from people people who made complaints to their local Data Protection office about such issues only to be told there&#x27;s nothing that can be done.

HN rants about it because it’s not a good solution. It identified a problem but caused an idiotic fallout (cookie banners) and failed to actually put in a framework to enforce that companies aren’t just lying.

FWIW in Illinois, where I’ve experienced this, there is a bill <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilga.gov&#x2F;ftp&#x2F;legislation&#x2F;102&#x2F;billstatus&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;10200HB3910.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ilga.gov&#x2F;ftp&#x2F;legislation&#x2F;102&#x2F;billstatus&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;102...</a> that appears to be GDPR-esque or CCPA-esque. Seems to have little interest though.

Things like that are on my mind when HN rants about GDPR. Something like this would be wildly illegal where I live.

Thanks for the heads up. Luckily I can go back to analog with certified funds to pay rent. I suspect, without evidence, this is due to the relatively strong tenant protections in Chicago.

I’ve had to deal with Bilt [0]. In case you’re not aware, they have a “feature” called Instant Link that automatically pulls ALL of your personal and sensitive financial data from financial institutions, including your credit card accounts, balances, etc. They apparently do this via a partnership with a company called Method Financial [1].It’s frankly the most intrusive thing I’ve ever encountered in any software I’ve ever used—I’m not sure how it’s even legal, but this is America where we have no real privacy rights.Instead of giving you the option to opt in for them to get this level of access, they automatically enroll you into it when your account is created, pull your data, and then allow you to “opt out” afterward, which enables them to have access to your personal and sensitive financial data anyway. And since you literally must have an account with them if your building uses their services for rent payments, they’ve effectively rigged the system to force millions of folks to unknowingly give them access to their personal and sensitive financial data.Anyway, in your Bilt privacy settings, there are some options you can disable (including Instant Link), and I recommend that you disable ALL of them, although given the dark practices of this company, I don’t even trust that those settings are actually honored.Side note: Did you know about a company called Method Financial that somehow has real-time access to ALL of your personal and sensitive financial data? Did you know that this company you never heard of that has said access then sells that access to the highest bidder? Do you remember agreeing to any of that anywhere? Yeah, me neither (on all counts)…[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biltrewards.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.biltrewards.com</a>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;methodfi.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;methodfi.com</a>

Oh, here I thought it was because every time I want to remember info about an order, it forces me back to their platform, rather than simply searching my email like I do for every other item I&#x27;ve ever purchased.(And no, I don&#x27;t use gmail.)

What&#x27;s most interesting to me about that is that they are willing to disclose that data to your email provider. Amazon, for example, is pretty cagey about what you&#x27;ve bought when sending emails, probably because they don&#x27;t want Google to be able to use that information to target ads to you. (Not because they are Good and care about your privacy, but because they think they&#x27;re going to beat Google at advertising. How&#x27;s that going?)So yeah, I don&#x27;t get why they would do this. It gives their advertising competitors valuable data for free, and it pisses off customers by telling them that they&#x27;re being tracked when they shop at Walgreens. Strange stuff.

It was opt-out for me. Or at least, I was never given informed consent that this data exchange going to take place.The landlord of course makes it _seem_ like you have no other modes of paying rent. The cashier’s check option is buried in the fine print.Dark patterns all around IMO.

It was initially opt in for me, then they made it mandatory.(Sure, I could pay by check but consumer banking technology&#x2F;US in the US already feels like is is lagging a decade behind other countries without voluntarily going further back. Paying by check every month would be quite inconvenient.)I&#x27;d already decided to avoid bilt as much as possible, but reading this thread prompted me to try going a little further.Looking through their privacy policy it talks about what California residents can do under CCPA: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;legal.biltrewards.com&#x2F;policies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;legal.biltrewards.com&#x2F;policies</a>&gt; Request to Know... The specific pieces of Personal Information we collected about you.&gt; You have the right to opt-out from having your Personal Information and Sensitive Personal Information sold to third parties. You also have the right to opt-out from having your Personal Information and Sensitive Personal Information shared with third parties for purposes of cross-contextual advertisingMight as well give this a go.

I believe that&#x27;s opt-in. At least it seemed to be when my landlord switched to Bilt.There&#x27;s a section of your Bilt profile that shows your other credit cards and whether you want them linked. It&#x27;s pretty freaky to see them listed in the first place.I definitely keep them off.Bilt is ultimately a big points&#x2F;reward program though, so you might get points for having them connected.I still haven&#x27;t figured out exactly what Bilt&#x27;s business plan is, but the main part seems to be trying to get as much financial data on people as possible, and partnering with landlords to do so, and since it&#x27;s how to pay your rent you can&#x27;t unenroll completely. (Unless you maybe mail your landlord a paper check?)

Preparation H, they should practice some level of sensitivity with such information.

Loyalty cards are one avenue for data brokers to get your purchase history. Credit cards can also sell your purchase data. Currently the only safe-ish way to be anonymous is with cash. That may disappear with pervasive face recognition and cell phone tracking.

That&#x27;s what I do, but I assume some stores like Target also track you by Bluetooth, facial recognition, etc, and can correlate any past or future cash purchases if you use your credit card once for maybe a large innocuous purchase.

So paying by cash is the easiest way to generally avoid this?Clearly you can decide not to use Bilt, but maybe you get caught out some other way (bank, ...) - too difficult to track the trackers.

I&#x27;m assuming you&#x27;re using your Bilt card when this happens.
Your Bilt agreement stipulates how itemized transaction data (level 3 in payment terms, with level 2 being &quot;enriched&quot; with subtotals&#x2F;tax and merchant information- which is what you typically see with your normal bank)Card networks (Mastercard, VISA) have different fee structures that incentivize more detailed information like level 3 for lower processing fees for merchants - here&#x27;s more details on levels <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;na-gateway.mastercard.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;integrationGuidelines&#x2F;supportedFeatures&#x2F;pickAdditionalFunctionality&#x2F;levelIIAndIIIData&#x2F;index.html?locale=en_US" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;na-gateway.mastercard.com&#x2F;api&#x2F;documentation&#x2F;integrat...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.biltrewards.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;5536526023565-What-bank-services-the-Bilt-Mastercard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.biltrewards.com&#x2F;hc&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;articles&#x2F;5536526023...</a>Perhaps more interesting in your case is that if you had your card issues in or before 2022, it&#x27;s likely with Evolve bank which was breached - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@HackLaddy&#x2F;when-your-bank-doxxes-you-91522d8b66db" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@HackLaddy&#x2F;when-your-bank-doxxes-you-9152...</a>

If you find the condoms overly sensitive you can try one of the &quot;long lasting&quot; versions.

The best part of every post in the ycombinator is the comments. Always learn a lot.I think another big problem is pharmacies. The amount of data shared with health insurance companies must be huge.

This literally just happened to me last week. I emailed them to ask them how to stop this:<pre><code> &gt; I understand you want to opt out of all points and rewards and not be tracked. 
 &gt; 
 &gt; We&#x27;re constantly working to make Bilt as rewarding as possible. Currently, we don&#x27;t have an option to opt out of points or rewards. To prevent your transactions from being tracked, the most effective step is to unlink your card from your Bilt account.
 &gt; 
 &gt; To unlink the card:
 &gt;
 &gt; Go to the Wallet tab &gt; Scroll down to the Your Linked Cards section.
 &gt; Look for the card you would like to unlink and tap View all benefits.
 &gt; Click the ellipsis [:] on the top right, then tap Edit &gt; Unlink.
</code></pre>
Gah, I hate this service and will avoid renting on buildings that use it in the future.

What’s most strange to me is why this Bilt company would pay for that data feed and somehow think it provides some value to you. It’s obviously just creepy way of saying we know too much about you

This happened to me with square (block). I bought furniture, and they used square and required my email address for delivery. And then after that, anywhere I used square to pay for something using the same card, they would email me a receipt. I complained and they played dumb and never did anything.I just stopped using that card with square.

What if landlords could reach their grubby hands into the data firehose their tenants spew out? I can save 5% on some useless shit at X store, you say? Sign me up!Bilt as a concept is the biggest pile of late stage enshittification horse shit I’ve ever seen.

There are quite a few interesting tracking flows out there.My rent is paid through a company called Bilt.I discovered that when I shop at Walgreens now, Bilt sends me an email containing the full receipt of what I bought like so:<pre><code> &gt; Hey [inahga],
 &gt;
 &gt; You shopped at Walgreens on 12&#x2F;1&#x2F;24 and earned Bilt Points with your
 &gt; Neighborhood Pharmacy benefit.
 &gt;
 &gt; Items eligible for rewards
 &gt; TOSTITOS HINT OF LIME RSTC 11OZ
 &gt; $3.50
 &gt; 
 &gt; +3 pts
 &gt; TOSTITOS RSTC 12OZ
 &gt; $3.50
 &gt;
 &gt; +3 pts
 &gt; Other items*
 &gt; EXCLUDED ITEMS
 &gt; $0.07
 &gt;
 &gt; *May include rewards-ineligible items and&#x2F;or prescriptions.
</code></pre>
Ostensibly (hopefully) it would exclude sensitive items, plan B, condoms, etc...I&#x27;m curious how this data flows from Walgreens to my rent company, but maybe I&#x27;d rather not know and just use cash&#x2F;certified check from now on.

The browser has less access to your system, and usually only if you give a specific website permission to use these features. Mobile operating systems are slowly changing that though.

At least on android the browser is limited by the android permission system, i.e. if you dont give browser GPS permissionit cannot give pages dito. In addition the browser will ask if you want to grant an app access to something like positioning data.Furthermore, it is hard for a web page to run in background and receive user data.

Extended to add don’t use websites without blockers. If they are willing to track via app, why would we think they would not track via browser?

How will that help? It’s even easier to track across websites than apps and websites can also get your ip address to track you.

Don&#x27;t use mobile apps that could just be websites.

&quot;Precise&quot; has a specific meaning for iOS Location Services and this ain&#x27;t it. Presumably it&#x27;s just doing IP geolocation which could be the same post code, or it could be the wrong city entirely. I&#x27;d expect it to be much worse on LTE than WiFi.

&gt;Eh. Zip code level location + timestamp is still pretty invasive, even if, pedantically, that’s not very precise.That&#x27;s basically sent to multiple parties (ISPs, transit providers, CDNs, analytics&#x2F;advertising&#x2F;diagnostics&#x2F;security vendors) everytime you visit a website. If this counts as &quot;invasive&quot; to you, you shouldn&#x27;t be connected to the internet at all, much less buying a tracking device (a smartphone) and installing random ad-supported apps on it.

Eh. Zip code level location + timestamp is still pretty invasive, even if, pedantically, that’s not very precise.We should compare if there a differences in the data sent in countries with better data privacy laws.

Cell carriers will gladly sell that information to apps. You can make calls to them over the cellular network (even if Wi-Fi is active!) and they will hand it back to you. No location services is required to do this.

&gt;If it was LTE, I bet the lat&#x2F;lon would be much more precise.False. Apps don&#x27;t have access to cellid information unless they also have location permissions, in which case they can just request your location directly.&gt;the free apps you install and use collect your precise location with timestamp [...]This is alarmist and contradictory given that the author admits a few paragraphs up that the &quot;location shared was not very precise&quot;. It might be possible for the app to request precise location via location services, but the app doesn&#x27;t request such permissions (at least on android, you can&#x27;t check for requested permissions on iOS without installing the app and running it), so such apps are most definitely limited to &quot;not very precise&quot; locations.&gt;At the same time, there is so much data in the requests that I&#x27;d expect ad exchanges to find some loophole ID that would allow cross-app tracking without the need for IDFA.At least in theory they&#x27;re not supposed to do that, but it&#x27;d be hard to enforce.&quot;If a user resets the Advertising Identifier, then You agree not to combine, correlate, link or otherwise associate, either directly or indirectly, the prior Advertising Identifier and any derived information with the reset Advertising Identifier. &quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;terms&#x2F;apple-developer-program-license-agreement&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;support&#x2F;terms&#x2F;apple-developer-pr...</a>

My thought here is that there is likely a lot of leaked data on ads themselves, that is one of the reasons why you would need the VPN&#x2F;proxy. Additionally you could (potentially) create fake browser fingerprint credentials on the fly to feed sites and have the VPN&#x2F;proxy track the ads that show up for those credentials. (other credentials like email and the like could also be created by the app for you) You don&#x27;t see the bid data, but you may be able to control the tracking that spurs it and you can see the results of it so a setup like this could likely make some inferences.I don&#x27;t know this industry well and the tech here has long sense eclipsed me so I really don&#x27;t know what is possible but I imagine there are possibilities with this setup.

Wouldn&#x27;t this require access to bid side data? The OP mentions it&#x27;s pretty easy to get, but any company using this to expose advertisers is going to get their access cut off pretty fast. As the saying goes, &quot;snitches get stitches&quot;.

There&#x27;s no question about who the players involved are.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;authorized-buyers&#x2F;rtb&#x2F;openrtb-guide" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.google.com&#x2F;authorized-buyers&#x2F;rtb&#x2F;openrtb-...</a>

You can&#x27;t. Because the creation is done in some proprietary software either bundled in the App or (worse) in the server somewhere.

A long time ago I had the idea to create an &#x27;accountability server&#x27;. The high level idea was for it to generate unique credentials so that you could track to the source who sold your info. There are some ways to do that now, but I wonder if it is time to start exploring that idea again. If you exposed it as a VPN&#x2F;proxy+app that ran on a server in your home, so that you could collect your own data and provide unique credentials on account creation, then I wonder how much that combination could figure out. Since it could act as a man in the middle it potentially could annotate credential source and see the ads and potentially track them to source. &quot;This male enhancement pill ad is linked to your tire purchase.&quot; There is a lot of hand waving here, but I wonder if something like this could be built. The first step to stopping things like this is showing people who did it to them.

Only if you don&#x27;t turn WiFi off. To my understanding even the &quot;soft off&quot; option present in iOS stops the phone from beaconing, and just listens in order to collect data for building augmented location services. I don&#x27;t know what the Androids do. These days both of them also offer randomized MAC address to curtail such tracking.

Stores have WiFi hotspots with very short range to track you that way while you&#x27;re in the isle.

It’s not that accurate.  E911 location was a few miles off.

With GPS off, location can triangulated from cell tower usage to within 3&#x2F;4 of a square mile (smaller uncertainty in urban areas where cell towers are closer together).  I&#x27;d heard before that some data brokers do this, but in this article the writer mentions reverse DNS lookup on IP addresses, which they mention is less precise (ZIP-code level).

What does happen if I turn off location&#x2F;gps? I guess that location has to be quite imprecise.

Android for sure, since version 8 I&#x27;m certain but probably even 5 or 4.x (so 10+ years ago)Always annoys me when I want to use a WiFi scanner to determine the range of an access point in different locations for example and it needs me to turn on location access first before it can get WiFi data. The open source app doesn&#x27;t have an Internet connection so there&#x27;s no way for it to send back data to the mothership even if it had an SSID database baked into the apk. For me, and traditionally, the location switch is to turn on or off energy-hungry GPS hardware, not gatekeep when I trust apps to collect my location. I can set those to &quot;only while in use&quot;, deny their Internet access, or just not install them if I don&#x27;t trust them with the location permission

&gt;Do mobile OS&#x27;s require additional permissions for apps to get either of these data points?Yes on both iOS and Android as far as I can remember.

But all it takes is one app with that permission to tie you to all the others. And there are always apps that need your location at some point to provide useful data. At this point I’m not sure there’s any single app I trust.

iOS definitely requires Precise location permission allowed for the app to see your WiFi name &#x2F; ssid and other WiFi around you

On iOS at least you can set the MAC address to be different per access point or to rotate on the same access point or to use your normal MAC

Is WiFi access point geolocation by SSID or MAC address? Do mobile OS&#x27;s require additional permissions for apps to get either of these data points?

&gt; screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I&#x27;m wearing headphonesNone of those are likely to change when you navigate from one website to another, with tracking&#x2F;ads disabled, which is what they want to be able to track. Otherwise they&#x27;d just use their cookies.One device visits a site where you sell ads. A minute later, an unknown device with identical battery, volume, headphone, brightness, model number, browser version, and boot time to the second arrives on another site you run ads on. There&#x27;s a pretty good chance they&#x27;re related, because the odds of all those being the same plus those two sites and recent timings involved is rather low: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coveryourtracks.eff.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;coveryourtracks.eff.org&#x2F;</a>Plus it doesn&#x27;t have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough in bulk to sell.

Everything listed changes way too often to be useful for tracking. My guess is that it&#x27;s for anti-fraud purposes. Someone setting up fake devices and&#x2F;or device farms is likely to get similar values, which means they can be detected via ML or whatever.

Unfortunately fingerprinting prevention&#x2F;resistance tactics become a readily identifiable signal unto themselves. I.e., the &#x27;random noise&#x27; becomes fingerprintable if not widely utilized.Everyone would need to be generating the same &#x27;random noise&#x27; for any such tactics to be truly effective.

It would be amazing if you could build and send fake profiles of this information to create fake browser fingerprints and help track the trackers. Similarly, creating a lot of random noise here may help hide the true signal, or at least make their job a lot harder.

It&#x27;s also useful for making ads more effective &amp; manipulation overall. As long as you can connect the data you track &amp; buy, you can use Thompson sampling. In fact, why would we think knowing the name of a person is anything but bad business?

Technically, information are the bits you DON&#x27;T know. Once you know the bits, it isn&#x27;t &quot;information&quot; in the Shannon sense, in that it takes no energy to reset a message if you know all the bits, but takes N-units of energy for N unknown bits of information. (See; Feynman&#x27;s lectures on computation)

&gt; adding entropy to de-anonymize users_removing_ entropy, by adding more information bits

They’ve basically turned every phone into a tracking beacon

Straight up fingerprinting us without consent it’s pure insanity.

Combine this with IP, timestamp, and some behavioral patterns, and you’ve got an extremely robust tracking mechanism that operates outside of explicit consent mechanisms.

Surely that could be done without sending the brightness to some 3rd party.

I believe some apps actually have to automatically brighten up your screen when displaying a QR code for scanning, and then reduce back the brightness of its previous setting when moving out of the QR code.
I believe the Whole Foods app does this for its first screen.

Taken as one of a thousand attributes it&#x27;s likely to provide at least some discriminatory lift in isolating a single user, even if tiny.

Screen brightness can identify weather you are outside or inside.

&gt; But let&#x27;s say an advertiser comes to you and says &quot;we want to spend $1M &#x2F; day to advertise our 10GB game, but only to devices that could install it.&quot;I don&#x27;t want to call you a liar, but having seen ads that are presumably targeted at me, it feels like a total fiction to say that anyone is actually capable or interested in doing this.I get advertisements for just absolute nonsense garbage that has no bearing on my life, and no bearing on anything that could have possibly been collected from my device.The closest thing is that when I was in Mexico for a week, some of my podcast pre-roll ads were in Spanish. (Which, I should note, I do not speak fluently enough to even understand.) Even now, the occasional ad I&#x27;m served on a podcast is in Spanish.And that&#x27;s it. They saw that my IP came from Quintana Roo, and (somewhat reasonably) decided that I need to hear Spanish-language content. Even when I physically moved back to the United States.

I&#x27;m in this industry, and I have knowledge about this.It&#x27;s important to point out that it takes a long time for uptake of new versions of ad SDKs. The general assumption is that it takes about 6 months after release of a new version for 50% of ad traffic to come from that version or newer. Also, for every version you release, approximately 1% of traffic will never upgrade past that version.In that kind of world, over-collecting data makes sense, especially if you think nobody will ever find out. Like total &#x2F; and free disk space. There&#x27;s no good reason to need those, right? But let&#x27;s say an advertiser comes to you and says &quot;we want to spend $1M &#x2F; day to advertise our 10GB game, but only to devices that could install it.&quot; All of a sudden it&#x27;s useful to know that a device only has 8GB of disk space, or only 100MB of free space.So OK, if we didn&#x27;t collect disk space, now it makes sense to collect disk space. Let&#x27;s add it to the SDK. It takes a month or two to release a new version of the SDK. 3 months to get any meaningful traffic from it, and another 3 months to get up to 50% of your traffic. Assuming the ramps are linear, 4 months of 0%, and then 3 months of ramping to 50%, 30 days per month, you&#x27;ll make $22.5M in the first 7 months. But if you had the logic in there to begin with, you&#x27;d have made $210M during the same time period. That makes it an easy choice for the business folks.There are answers to this, but they all have drawbacks. You could limit data that ad agencies can collect. This reduces the value of ads. And agencies have learned that some data (like location) is low-value and high-risk, so they&#x27;re removing the ability to supply it. I think it&#x27;d be better to support a model where ad code can be updated independently of the app. This way we could push out bug fixes faster, and could remove our just-in-case collection, but Apple has no signs that this is coming soon, and Google&#x27;s answer has been such a shit-show that we aren&#x27;t considering it viable over the next 4 years.Edit: To address screen brightness specifically, it&#x27;s a very rough proxy for age of the user.

&gt; Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I&#x27;m wearing headphones?This is clearly adding entropy to de-anonymize users between apps, rather than to add specificity to ad bids.

Probably referring to Jobs&#x27; initial stance that HTML5 is more than sufficient for &quot;apps&quot;. Of course, he acquiesced and eventually added the App Store.

What? [0][0] Steve Jobs introduces App Store - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eU3X6Fu5JiE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eU3X6Fu5JiE</a>

Steve jobs embraced web apps as much as he could.[0]. But people weren&#x27;t willing to give up desktop apps.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20070809174426&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple.com&#x2F;pr&#x2F;library&#x2F;2007&#x2F;06&#x2F;11iphone.html?sr=hotnews.rss" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20070809174426&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.apple....</a>

Websites tend to have more ads and tracking than native apps, and they&#x27;re still getting your ip address.

May be Steve Jobs was right all along. We dont need Smartphone with App Store. Either 1st Party Apps and Everything else should be on Browser or Apps that uses Browser Engine.

Blaming China is easy and has bipartisan appeal while actual data privacy regulations are hard and do not.

Are the police evil state actors? They purchase location data from private companies to target protesters[1][1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2022&#x2F;08&#x2F;how-law-enforcement-around-country-buys-cell-phone-location-data-wholesale" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2022&#x2F;08&#x2F;how-law-enforcement-ar...</a>

Congress is pretty ok with whatever Trump says, we have always been at war&#x2F;peace with TikTokia.

Zuck&#x27;s lobbyists pay better than China&#x27;s.

&gt; was shocked by the amount and types of data sent with the bids to ad exchanges.Can this data fall into the hands of &quot;evil&quot; state actors, and why is Congress OK with that and not with tiktok?

That you can get an approximate address based on an IP address is not very new, and is in fact a feature baked into the very IP protocol.

great writeup. keep forensic faraday bags around.

Seriously, anyone who ever says they have nothing to hide, show them this story.&quot;A Redding Police Department officer in 2021 was charged with six misdemeanors after being accused of accessing CLETS to set up a traffic stop for his fiancée&#x27;s ex-husband, resulting in the man&#x27;s car being towed and impounded, the local outlet A News Cafe reported. Court records show the officer was fired, but he was ultimately acquitted by a jury in the criminal case. He now works for a different police department 30 miles away.&quot;California Law Enforcement Misused State Databases More Than 7,000 Times in 2023
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;california-police-misused-state-databases-more-7000-times-2023" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;california-police-misu...</a>

Because I don&#x27;t want to rest of the house to smell?A different argument that appeals to some is that you might not have something to hide, but what about the people who do? For the greater good of society, whistleblowers are needed to expose malfeasance by the corrupt and it&#x27;s going to make it much harder for any of them to come forwards if their reward is literally exile to Russia. If you&#x27;re in support of a slow slide into dystopia, go ahead and argue against all privacy. Whether a given situation rises to that level is an different but adjacent topic, but appealing to something some people can believe in, such as not letting the rich and powerful get away with being utterly corrupt in their dealings is a way to find common ground, with some. not everyone cares about that though, but it&#x27;s an additional argument for privacy.

The problem is, I could not formulate anything in this way in a professional setting. I want my co workers to understand because I feel a bit uneasy working with people who do not but I also don&#x27;t want to scare them.

There are a few examples I use when I hear such ignorant statements:
1. Not caring about privacy cuz you’ve got nothing to hide is like saying you don’t care about freedom of speech cuz you’ve got nothing to say.
2. If you don’t care about privacy, why don’t you poop with an open door, for everyone to observe?

See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1drrjtu&#x2F;i_dont_have_nothing_to_hide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;linux&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1drrjtu&#x2F;i_dont_have_...</a>.My examples:- You get an HIV diagnosis (or other terrible disease). Do you want everyone you meet to know?- You feel depressed or burnt out. Should your employer know?- You&#x27;re financially in a bad place. Do you want your kids to know? Do you want your kids&#x27; friends to know?- Do you share your salary with everyone?- If someone&#x27;s gay, should this be public information?- Should your religion be public? Your political points of view?

Losing privacy makes you more vulnerable to economic exploitation (price discrimination, salary negotiation, insurance premiums, etc). Therefore protecting your privacy is a form of economic self-defense.

Just ask for their email password and see what they say. Usually though this comment is just them trying to change the subject because very few people know or care about any of this

A while ago a co worker told me &quot;why would you care about your privacy? all my data is already out there anyway and what can even be done with it anyway&quot;.What would be the ideal response to such an absurd comment? At the time I found it hard to answer because she surprised me with that opinion.Edit to note: the explanation should be compatible with a professional context. I don&#x27;t want to scare my co workers or appear crazy&#x2F;paranoid.

neat details shared, might check out later.Does this apply to Brave browser?

My apologies, thank you for clarifying and thank you for the brilliant article. Have updated my comment.

This technique doesn&#x27;t work anymore on android because you can no longer add certificates to the system store and apps are free to choose to accept the user store CAs or not. That was changed in Android 7. For &quot;security&quot; they say. Security of Googles business model I&#x27;m sure.

I decrypted them all by installing Charles SSL cert on the iphone. 
This is why the requests seem not SSL proxied.

Whilst I trust that the author did in fact look at the data of each request eventually, the screenshot they provided of Charles could not have been of the exact requests they intercepted given Charles is indicating that those are not yet SSL proxied (except for the 2 GET requests).EDIT: please ignore, author did it differently to what I expected.

I&#x27;m sure the company will argue the warranty is voided akin to how trucks have &quot;not liable for damage from rocks&quot; or w&#x2F;e (they are).IIRC, this is under the Magnuson-Moss act but I didn&#x27;t find it when skimming wikipedia.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...</a>

This is usually side-stepped by being a violation of Terms of Service, which is a much lower legal hurdle.The warranty is intact, but the device is bricked, because it can&#x27;t bypass any of the authentication that is required to do... Pretty much everything.

I&#x27;ll answer the, &quot;Does disabling it void your warranty?&quot; question. The answer is almost always &quot;no&quot;. Unless the modification you make to something actually directly or indirectly caused damage to it, companies in the US cannot &quot;void the warranty&quot;.

That’s pretty interesting. What was the purpose of the statistical sample? What did your company want to know precisely?

Those aren&#x27;t questions that have fixed answers. The data available is pretty far beyond what I&#x27;m personally comfortable with though.One OEM I&#x27;m familiar with had such a policy. My org determined that we needed a statistical reference to compare against within a certain area. Some calls were made to the right people and shortly after we had a (mildly) anonymized map of high precision tracks for every vehicle of that brand within the area over some period.

&gt; Do some insurance companies charge less when provided access to policy owner driving patterns which the companies infer reduce their risk? Sure.&gt; But that is a different question.In what way? A discount for allowing surveillance is identical to an extra charge for disallowing it. They&#x27;re identical, unless the &quot;base&quot; rate is set externally somehow.$5 for lemonade, $3 off if you skip the lemon == $2 for sugar water, $3 extra to add lemon.

&gt; Lastly, does your insurance shoot up if you have a car without one of these systems?This question I can answer with a reasonable degree of certainty; no, it does not.Insurance companies increase rates for automobile coverage for many reasons, real or illusionary. But &quot;does your insurance shoot up&quot; strictly for not having a recording device in a vehicle is not one of them.Do some insurance companies charge less when provided access to policy owner driving patterns which the companies infer reduce their risk? Sure.But that is a different question.

I&#x27;m really happy to see this level of detail and research. So many privacy-related articles either wholly lack in technical skill, or hysterically cannot differentiate between different levels of privacy concerns and risks.People commonly point to Mozilla&#x27;s research regarding vehicle&#x27;s privacy policies. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foundation.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foundation.mozilla.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;privacy-nightmare-on-...</a>) But that research only states what the car company&#x27;s lawyers felt they must include in their privacy policies. These policies imply (and I&#x27;m sure, correctly imply) that your conversations will be recorded when you&#x27;re in the vehicle. But, they never drill down into the real technical details. For instance ..... are car companies recording you the whole time and streaming ALL of your audio from ALL of your driving? Are they just recording you at a random samples? Are they ONLY recording you when you&#x27;re issuing voice commands, and the lawyers are simply hedging their bets regarding what sort of data _might_ come through accidentally during those instances? Once they record you, where is the data stored, and for how long? Is it sent to 3rd parties, etc? Which of these systems can be disabled, and via what means? Does disabling these systems disable any other functionality of the vehicle, or void its warranty? Lastly, does your insurance shoot up if you have a car without one of these systems? etc ...The list of questions could go almost indefinitely, and presumably, would vary strongly across manufacturers. So much of the privacy news out there is nothing but scary and often not very substantiated worst case scenarios. Without the details and means to improve privacy, all these stories can do is spread cynicism. I&#x27;m really glad to see this level of discourse for the author.

Would be interesting to know how much data leaks on a new iPhone with some of the iOS privacy settings enabled and a handful of popular apps installed (WhatsApp, Instagram, Google Maps, Uber, etc).And then if you use a commercial VPN with DNS ad-blocking enabled, how much more does this help?

All these companies operate from within USA jurisdiction, that should send the world clear message.Snowden in one of interviews talks about exactly this kind of tracking with Amazon example (ts 01:18:00) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;JohnStossel&#x2F;status&#x2F;1885382675810181612" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;JohnStossel&#x2F;status&#x2F;1885382675810181612</a>Basically, all these companies, ad networks, data brokers, big tech with absence of basic privacy laws (not to be confused with 4th amendment that binds Fed and State gov only, but does not restraint companies) act with wilful conspiracy with US government regulators, washing each other hand like a monopoly. This data gets enriched and collided and is perpetually on a permanent record.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Permanent_Record_(autobiography)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Permanent_Record_(autobiograph...</a>So next time you talk about totalitarian regimes around the world look in the window.

Minor nitpick, but aren&#x27;t ads sold to the highest bidder?

Kind of a joke, but it could be useful for determining if they should serve light-mode or dark-mode ads. But I suppose they could just detect if dark&#x2F;light mode are enabled.

Automatic brightness probably helps honestly. It could help confirm whether someone is in fact in an area that has high levels of lighting around them (e.g., in a store, at a beach on a sunny day, etc.)Everything little piece of data that is gathered and used can help even if it isn&#x27;t immediately apparent.Now I could be wrong on this, but I feel like advertisers don&#x27;t need to know something is true about a user, they just need to be confident something is true about a user and that&#x27;s where data points like screen brightness can be of help to them.

A lot of people have &quot;autobrightness&quot; on. I&#x27;d think brightness doesn&#x27;t help much here

&gt; There&#x27;s no &quot;personal information&quot; here, but honestly this amount of data shared with an arbitrary list of 3rd parties is scary.
Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I&#x27;m wearing headphones?Screen brightness, boot time, memory, and network operator could probably fingerprint any device all by itself.

GrapheneOS also allows you to toggle the Network permission of any app

NetGuard with DROP OUTBOUND policy once again proves helpful. The only app that shows ads that I have on my phone is a PDF scanner, and I don&#x27;t allow it internet access.

I don’t know the answer to this, which is why I didn’t mention it in the post. 
However, I could speculate that these data-broker companies scrape leaked [hacked and stolen] data from various panels and then match records on their end. 
kinda OSINT for bad reasons.

how the MAID&#x2F;IDfV gets into the PII-ID databases?It seems that part is completely missing. (Or I missed it.)So for example can&#x2F;do airlines sell it? Or telecom&#x2F;utility companies, when you use their app?

Great article, thanks for taking the time to research and write it all up! Definitely learned some new things from it.

Wow, such a beautiful article you have written. Usually, I’m not into reading much but after very long I’ve completed a full article with such interest. Thanks for it !!

wow @apokryptein thanks for posting my article here... I&#x27;m shocked it&#x27;s #1 rn. 
if anyone has any questions regarding the post - I&#x27;m here to answer &amp; talk!

Another &quot;funny&quot; thing regarding Microsoft xandrI sent them my uid2 and they still say they can&#x27;t link to an identity and don&#x27;t have a match in their database

The leaked tools that NSA used, like XKEYSCORE, used publicly available data collection methods, including purchasing advertiser lists, to cross correlate all the data and form a profile. So anybody could do this stuff.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taskandpurpose.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;russia-ukraine-cell-phones-track-combat&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;taskandpurpose.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;russia-ukraine-cell-phones-t...</a>Not riding off ad geolocation but hijacking a UA app: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdstrike.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;brochures&#x2F;FancyBearTracksUkrainianArtillery.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdstrike.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;brochures&#x2F;FancyBearTr...</a>

I wonder: to which extent are purchased&#x2F;brokered app real-time location data feeds used by various intelligence services to target missile strikes in war zones? In e.g. Ukraine&#x2F;Russia.

The article does not explain how PII gets into the databases, and the critical link the IDfV... how do databases connect it to people&#x27;s name&#x2F;address?It gets leaked if the app I use gets my name&#x2F;address, like Uber, right?

True. But even paid apps have access to these data and can collect it without our knowledge. A genius called Stallman proposed solution decades ago. Free software aka. open source software. But outside of tech community, open source is not a known term. Maybe we should market it wherever possible, if we want true privacy and freedom.

I&#x27;m surprised people think they have any kind of privacy - especially when using free services. They are not free. You pay with whatever data can be extracted from your devices and behavior.Also, there&#x27;s a looong list of companies who know the location of your mobile device, starting from the cell phone tower operator to Apple&#x2F;Google and many in between.

Apple’s “privacy protections” are nothing more than marketing.“Ask app not to track” is a wash and privacy theater at best. One of the reasons I still run ad blocking on _all_ websites and at the network layer. Sorry “content creators” but you need to get your revenue from elsewhere (ie, sponsored content).Now I want a phone that scrambles all of this data on a per app (or phone) basis.Malicious app wants this data? Sure you can have it. But you will get randomized values for every bit of information — resolution, lat&#x2F;lon, brightness, battery level (user can set range of 90-100%), ….

Don&#x27;t all the ad-blocking DNS providers also support DNS-over-HTTPS now as well? I use it with AdGuard Home, and I saw PiHole supports it as well.

Which does absolutely nothing if your device or the app in question is permitted or otherwise not prevented from making DNS-over-HTTPS (or, less commonly because of its discrete port, DNS-over-TLS) queries.

It&#x27;s not insane at all. It is the entirety of their business model, so it makes sense that they will do everything possible to keep that sweet surveillance cash flowing.

One more reason I don’t use Facebook and will never install their app on my phone.

&gt; Facebook hard-code IP addresses when their domains are blockedSounds like an anti-censorship or a generic connectivity robustness feature [0]? WhatsApp and Instagram do this, too.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41959945">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41959945</a>

Facebook hard-code IP addresses when their domains are blocked. I found this out while using NextDNS alongside that logging functionality that iPhones have. It’s insane the lengths that they go to.

I&#x27;m a very happy paying customer of NextDNS (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextdns.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nextdns.io</a>) which blocks known adware and tracking hosts across all mobile and desktop platforms.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maxmind.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;home" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.maxmind.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;home</a>

This is a wonderful write up. The part that isn&#x27;t clear to me is how they&#x27;re getting the geolocation data if location services are turned off. Are they just going off geo-ip lookups? If you grant access to Bluetooth or finding devices on your local network, they can get more information to track your location. Absent that, how would they get better than geo-ip?

They say the leaked list is 2000 apps, but the linked spreadsheet has over 12000...And are these getting pulled from the store due to privacy violations? I&#x27;d assume Google would be aware at this point?

This is actually part of what I find so wrong about this entire idea.With all this fine granularity, it seems like ads would be incredibly relevant. Specifically about what you need with something that might actually result in a click-through to purchase a product. Especially if they get real-time updates on my hard-drive status and battery state.I don&#x27;t remember the last time I got an ad that was actually relevant. Pretty sure the last ad that was even clicked on was one of those little windmills that swirls crazily, cause it seemed like it might make a cool lawn ornament. Turned out it was tiny. Years of online purchases, and they don&#x27;t even suggest stuff I want.It just seems like an excuse.

&gt; The headphone, volume, brightness, and battery was just &quot;what&quot; kind of headshake about invasiveness. Somebody&#x27;d hand wave they need it (we want it, we want it). They obviously don&#x27;t.Well the why the ad industry wants it is clear: fingerprinting and segmentation. Someone consistently low on battery? Push them ads for powerbanks.

Yeah and if you ask for permission for every little thing then users are going to get bombarded even when it&#x27;s needed for legit purposes. It&#x27;s a difficult tradeoff to make, even if you want to do the right thing (and I&#x27;m not really sure that Apple and especially Google really do)

I dislike that as a developer, knowing something like the headphone status could be useful for the functionality of the app. But some other unscrupulous person is just exfiltrating it! This is part of the reason I agree with Apple’s stand against apps with sub-apps&#x2F;“desktop like” due to not fine-grained enough permission settings. There is a significant privacy downside to “superapps” and now Elon is pushing for the X everything app.

Parts I found relevant:<pre><code> - It was a clean state of a somewhat old phone (iPhone 11, factory defaults + new apple id)
 - A single (old) app was installed (Stack by KetchApp, 10-12 years old)
 - Was sending out an update a second pretty much instantly (5 kB - ~300 KB every second)
 - Within a minute: IP, Lat &#x2F; Lon, country, phone model, carrier &#x2F; network operator, vendor, OS version, connection type (wifi), headphone status (?), volume setting (?), screen brightness setting (?), battery status (?), CPU count, system RAM, free RAM allocation, free hard drive capacity, system boot time (?)
</code></pre>
Might as well just screen grab the Task Manager equivalent and hand it to them. Have better, quicker data about my own current RAM allocation and free hard space than I do. It hands them when the system booted for an ad? The headphone, volume, brightness, and battery was just &quot;what&quot; kind of headshake about invasiveness. Somebody&#x27;d hand wave they need it (we want it, we want it). They obviously don&#x27;t.Edit: It&#x27;s almost Remote Desktop, on an iPhone. Realtime (~1 Hz) RAM &#x2F; ROM allocation. Not sure how many Apple user even know how to check their realtime RAM &#x2F; ROM allocation. The free hard drive space especially is just asking for botnet downloads.Edit: Right, and ... disabling tracking doesn&#x27;t mean anything because numerous updates blatantly ignore the setting (&quot;uc&quot;: &quot;1&quot;, &#x2F;&#x2F; User consent for tracking = True;) and it&#x27;s just a flag while they still send your vendor specific customer identifier anyways.Really interesting article, and great investigation, just disturbing how much on an effectively clean phone.

What&#x27;s funny is that the exec I got on the phone was super supportive and helpful and was genuinely amused to hear from me and hear what was happening. He put me in touch with their &quot;Executive Support Team&quot; and it was after this that I guess someone realized they didn&#x27;t like the route I had taken.I feel somewhat vindicated after this announcement (though it does nothing to bring my account back):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;cybersecurity&#x2F;cfpb-fines-block-175m-over-cash-apps-lax-fraud-controls-210749768.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engadget.com&#x2F;cybersecurity&#x2F;cfpb-fines-block-175m...</a>&gt; Accessing any kind of customer service for Cash App was a challenge, too, according to the CFPB. Block included a customer service number on Cash App cards and in the app&#x27;s Terms of Service, but calling it would it ultimately lead users to &quot;a pre-recorded message directing consumers to contact customer support through the app.&quot;

&gt; CashApp terminated my account for this shenanigansDid you call to complain about the termination?

Most online forums ban &quot;doxing&quot; even if it&#x27;s theoretically legal.

Assuming these marketplaces operate within the bounds of the law, would it break HN’s ToS to post them? I’d be interested in pursuing the same strategy.

People will share their whole list because it’s simpler

I think it&#x27;s not properly appreciated that Apple fully endorses all of this. For two reasons: (1) the provision of the output of billions of dollars of developer time to their users for no up front cost (made back via ads) is super valuable to their platform; and (2) they uniquely could stop this (at the price of devastating their app store), but choose not to.In light of that, perhaps reevaluate their ATT efforts as far less about meaningful privacy and far more about stealing $10B a year or so from Facebook.

How about a no&#x2F;limited internet setting?  So many apps spy on you and they don’t need network at all to function.

&gt;Fortunately this is changing with iOS 18 with &quot;limited contacts&quot; sharing.Its not. Apple still owns your stuff. There is no difference between Apple and other 3p retailers. Apple just wants more of your money.

On android you can choose whether to grant access to contacts. And most apps work fine without.GrapheneOS, which I use, also has contact scopes, so troublesome apps that refuse to work without access will think they have full access. You can allow them to see no contacts or a small subset.There&#x27;s also multiple user profiles, a &quot;private space&quot;, and a work profile (shelter) that you can install an app into, which can be completely isolated from your main profile, so no contacts.It surprises me how far behind iOS is with this stuff. Recently I wanted to install a second instance of an app on my wife&#x27;s iPhone so she could use multiple logins simultaneously, there didn&#x27;t really seem to be a way to do it.

Interesting thing is that security practices mention that you should always grant the minimal set of permissions.So in case Apple allowed for “share all” it means that they did it by design and are changing it now only because of backlash.

Useless without limiting the kind of data I want to share per contact. iOS asks for relationships for example. You can set up your spouse, your kids, have your address or any address associated with contacts. If I want to restrict app access to contacts, I also want to restrict app access to specific contact details.

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

&gt;One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do.&gt;As soon as your cousin clicks &quot;Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you&quot; when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.Fortunately this is changing with iOS 18 with &quot;limited contacts&quot; sharing.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobiledevmemo.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2024&#x2F;09&#x2F;image.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobiledevmemo.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2024&#x2F;09&#x2F;image.p...</a>The interface also seems specifically designed to push people to allow only a subset of contacts, rather than blindly clicking &quot;allow all&quot;.The far bigger issue is the contact info you share with online retailers. Scraping contact info through apps is very visible, drawing flak from the media and consumers. Most of the time all you get is a name (could be a nickname), and maybe some combination of phone&#x2F;email&#x2F;address, depending on how diligent the person in filling out all the fields. On the other hand placing any sort of order online requires you to provide your full name, address, phone number, and email address. You can also be reasonably certain that they&#x27;re all accurate, because they&#x27;re plausibly required for delivery&#x2F;billing purposes. Such data can also be surreptitiously fed to data brokers behind the scenes, without an obvious &quot;tiktok would like access to your contacts&quot; modal.

Im also curious about this. Is it just a website you place an order or do you have to go through some kind of agent?

Exactly this was tried by the likes of James Oliver and journalists&#x2F;comedians of that caliber running ads and gathering data from politicians in Washington.It was some years ago and resulted in nothing

There was a post from someone a long time ago who has an email address and name similar to Make Cuban but not quite. He got quite a few cold call emails meant for Cuban. A lot of them were quite sad (people asking for money for medical procedures and such).

&gt; The rules should apply to the ones foisting this system upon us as well. This is probably the only way to make anyone in power reconsider current setup.Unless your problem is with the company doing the privacy violations, this doesn’t make any sense.

It&#x27;s odd that of the two replies referencing people, both got their names obviously wrong. Is that a new phishing tactic?

&lt;&lt; find an exec and buy their details for pennies and call them up on their cellphone. (this is usually successful, but can backfire badly -- CashApp terminated my account for this shenanigans)Honestly, kudos. The rules should apply to the ones foisting this system upon us as well. This is probably the only way to make anyone in power reconsider current setup.&lt;&lt; As soon as your cousin clicks &quot;Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you&quot; when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.And people laughed at Red Reddington when he said he had no email.

Yeah, I wonder if it might help to create a little newsletter for politicians and regulators. Send emails telling them exactly where they are, what apps they use, and so on. And send them the same information about their children.

Actually this could prove very useful for a resistance movement. Take them down with with their own medicine.

I&#x27;m using SignalHire most of the time recently

I&#x27;m not familiar with these marketplaces. Could you name a few examples?

What definition of contact details makes them not private?Contact details (your phone number, email or address) are definitively private information, you should be the one that decides who gets them and who doesn&#x27;t.

Check out Simplex chat. I just read about it from this HN submission yesterday: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42904966">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42904966</a>

I think this could be one of the more legitimate uses of blockchain - distributed communications, contacts, and a refundable pay-per-call system to make spam calling uneconomical. Communication in general does desperately need an overhaul, phones are effectively useless as phones nowadays.

The thing is...contact details aren&#x27;t really private information, basically by definition.The distinction is contact details privacy is based on the desire not be interrupted by people you didn&#x27;t agree to be interrupted by - i.e. it&#x27;s a spam problem - and realistically to solve this requires a total revamp of our communications systems (long overdue).The basic level of this would be forcing businesses to positively identify themselves to contact people - i.e. we need TLS certificates on voice calls, tied to government issued business identifiers. That would have the highest immediate impact, because we could retrain people not to talk to anyone claiming to be a business if there phone doesn&#x27;t show a certificate - we already teach this for email, so the skill is becoming more widespread.A more advanced version of this might be to get rid of the notion of fixed phone numbers entirely: i.e. sharing contacts is now just a cryptographic key exchange where I sign their public certificate which the cellphone infrastructure validates to agree to route a call to my device from their device (with some provisioning for chain of trust so a corporate entity can sign legally recognized bodies, but not say, transfer details around).This would solve a pile of problems, including just business decommissioning - i.e. once a company shuts down, even if you scraped their database you wouldn&#x27;t be able to use any of the contact information unless you had the hardware call origination gear + the telecom company still recognized the key.Add an escrow system on top of this so &quot;phone numbers&quot; can still work - i.e. you can get a random number to give to people that will do a &quot;trust on first use&quot; thing, or &quot;trust till revoked&quot; thing (i.e. no one needs to give a fake number anymore, convention would be they&#x27;re all fake numbers, but blocking the number would also not actually block anyone you still want to talk to).EDIT: I&#x27;ve sort of inverted the technical vs practical details here I realize - i.e. if I were implementing this, the public marketing campaign would be &quot;you can have as many phone numbers as you want&quot; but your friends don&#x27;t have to update if you change it. The UI ideally would be &quot;block this contact and revoke this number?&quot; on a phone which would be nice and unambiguous - possibly with a &quot;send a new number to your friends?&quot; option (in fact this could be 150 new numbers, one per friend since under the hood it would all be public key cryptography). I think people would understand this.

can we request our data deletion in these vendor????

&gt; find an exec and buy their details for pennies and call them up on their cellphoneThere is a vendor for this very thing in relation to business and government position called “zoominfo”

Could you please tell me how to buy this stuff? This sounds like a great way to get customer service when normal channels fail.

I realize why this is bad. Full stop.I wonder if it ever evoked an dive into exactly what happened to leave these customers with thinking this was the most likely avenue for success? Hopefully in at least some cases their calls with CSRs were reviewed and in the most optimistic of best cases additional training or policies were put into place to avoid the hopelessness that evokes such drastic actions.

&gt; (this is usually successful, but can backfire badly -- CashApp terminated my account for this shenanigans)When I was at a medium-sized consumer-facing company whose name you’d recognize if you’re in the tech space (intentionally vague) we had some customers try this. They’d find product managers or directors on LinkedIn then start trying to contact them with phone numbers found on the internet, personal email addresses, or even doing things like finding photos their family members posted and complaining the comments.We had to start warning them not to do it again, then following up with more drastic actions on the second violation. I remember several cases where we had to get corporate counsel involved right away and there was talk of getting law enforcement involved because some people thought implied threats would get them what they wanted.So I can see why companies are quick to lock out customers who try these games.

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 &quot;Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you&quot; 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&#x27;m getting stonewalled I just go onto a marketplace, find an exec and buy their details for pennies and call them up on their cellphone. (this is usually successful, but can backfire badly -- CashApp terminated my account for this shenanigans)

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