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

(timsh.org)
1957 points apokryptein | 1 comments | 02 Feb 25 17:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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theptip ◴[02 Feb 25 17:58 UTC] No.42910331[source]▶
> Why do they need to know my screen brightness, memory amount, current volume and if I'm wearing headphones?

This is clearly adding entropy to de-anonymize users between apps, rather than to add specificity to ad bids.

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1. Xen9 ◴[02 Feb 25 18:19 UTC] No.42910497[source]▶
It's also useful for making ads more effective & manipulation overall. As long as you can connect the data you track & buy, you can use Thompson sampling. In fact, why would we think knowing the name of a person is anything but bad business?