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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: 0.228s | source
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qingcharles ◴[02 Feb 25 20:40 UTC] No.42911578[source]▶
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 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)

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1. wkat4242 ◴[03 Feb 25 01:43 UTC] No.42914004[source]▶
And the combination of contacts are also unique enough to identify you. Even though they change over time. Some fuzzy matching, take in another few bits of fingerprint like device type and country and voila no advertiser ID required.

Ps smart idea to use it for that purpose. If I failed to get proper service I'd just review bomb the company everywhere and soon enough I'd get a call fixing my problem and asking to remove them :)