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

(timsh.org)
1957 points apokryptein | 2 comments | 02 Feb 25 17:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.613s | 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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jmward01 ◴[02 Feb 25 18:17 UTC] No.42910476[source]▶
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.
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nickburns ◴[02 Feb 25 18:24 UTC] No.42910540[source]▶
Unfortunately fingerprinting prevention/resistance tactics become a readily identifiable signal unto themselves. I.e., the 'random noise' becomes fingerprintable if not widely utilized.

Everyone would need to be generating the same 'random noise' for any such tactics to be truly effective.

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1. gitgud ◴[02 Feb 25 23:40 UTC] No.42913074[source]▶
That's why it should be the browsers & OS's that enforce such privacy measures... it shouldn't be an option that my Grandma needs to enable...
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2. jmward01 ◴[03 Feb 25 00:51 UTC] No.42913618[source]▶
Unfortunately the fox is building the hen-house. They 'should' build products that improve my experience but they have very little incentive to do that when they get paid so much for the data they can extract. What would actually do it is regulations similar to financial regulations. OS/browser companies shouldn't be allowed to do business with data brokers. Then they would have one primary customer, the consumer, and competition would focus on the correct outcome. But 'regulation' is an evil word so we aren't likely to see anything like that actually happen.