[HN Gopher] Help Us Find the Apps That Sell Your Location
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Help Us Find the Apps That Sell Your Location
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 146 points
Date : 2021-10-07 13:40 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (themarkup.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (themarkup.org)
| kiryin wrote:
| It's truly mindbending that we've arrived at a point where a
| database like this is necessary. What a sad and horrible
| existence this is.
| missedthecue wrote:
| You should reflect for a moment about how you are fortunate
| enough to live in the first generation where this is qualifies
| for being "sad and horrible".
| dylan604 wrote:
| Having a database like this is useless unless the masses start
| to care about the subject. There has yet to be a campaign
| successful enough in educating/convincing the masses into why
| this is a bad thing. For most, as long as the app allows them
| to communicate with friends, entertains them (or their kids)
| with a game, etc, and the app is free the masses just won't
| care.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Is there a way to examine the libraries that an iOS app uses?
| There might be a way to find apps that use common
| libraries/frameworks that pass your location to other services,
| if so.
| bruh2 wrote:
| If I understood correctly, this kind of database already exists
| at https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/
| monkeydust wrote:
| thanks for sharing - eye opening (!) - https://reports.exodus-
| privacy.eu.org/en/reports/56347/ - 10MM downloads and 56
| permissions on your phone. Toxic.
| nubela wrote:
| I really support this. We need clarity on which offending apps
| are doing this. And it isn't just location data. It's also apps
| which added a proxy backdoor powering networks like BrightData or
| OxyLabs.
|
| Or Contacts app that sell contact information to companies like
| Lusha.
| titzer wrote:
| It is incredible to me that location data harvesting (aka mass
| dystopian surveillance) is so pervasive that it requires a crowd-
| sourced investigative campaign. A generation ago it was neither
| technologically nor socially feasible to get even coarse-grained
| location data on a person's whereabouts.
|
| I hate this future. We sleepwalked into dystopia because money.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't know about the sleepwalking part. I'd say we sprinted
| towards it. We've had dystopian scifi for much longer than
| we've had the tech, but the reality makes some of the scifi
| authors look like they didn't have much of an imagination. Now
| that we've seen some of the "tech", the modern dystopian scifi
| like Black Mirror scares the bejeebus out of me. There's
| somebody out there that sees Black Mirror episodes and thinks
| "YES!! That's exactly what we need!" Except, we have the tech
| to actually do some of it.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| I hate it that not enough peope hate it enough for there to be
| hope.
|
| Its just mind boggling that society can self-devour in this
| way, but apparently its part of "how things work"
| newbamboo wrote:
| Democracy doesn't work and populism is a scare word. Bet on
| elite outrage or accept the future only a few sagacious,
| disregarded malcontents warned us about.
| amelius wrote:
| All because of ads.
|
| We should just ban all ads. That would solve all of these
| problems.
|
| If people feel they still need ads, we can create a nice
| sandbox for watching ads.
| boplicity wrote:
| > We should just ban all ads
|
| Please define what an ad is.
| laserlight wrote:
| I know it when I see it [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
| boplicity wrote:
| I'm not sure how true that is for advertisements. For
| example, there are many forms of 'hidden' advertisements
| that are designed to not be seen, and yet influence
| people. Among them are product placements. Heck, even
| Hacker News is an advertisement for YCombinator, though
| it certainly isn't seen that way by many people.
| [deleted]
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Comments like this are a weird form of semantic catnip nerd
| sniping that unproductively derails the discussion. "We
| should ban tall buildings." "Oh yeah? Well define exactly
| how tall a tall building is." Clearly there's a thing as an
| ad, because it's a common word everyone understands. If
| your point is that it would be hard to pin down the part of
| that that's actionable, well of course. It's always hard to
| get regulations right.
| [deleted]
| m463 wrote:
| Folks think advertisements are "showing me something I can
| buy"
|
| But really ads are a huge detailed dossier on every person,
| being sold so that water filter companies can bid the
| highest to get a water filter ad in front of the people
| with the largest income.
|
| Meanwhile, you like legos and lego will never be able to
| bid high enough to show you a lego ad (probably they don't
| need to anyhow)
|
| and the off-label uses for these dossiers... I wonder if
| used car salesmen can find out your "price insensitivity"
| and charge accordingly?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Please define what an ad is._
|
| I made this comment[0], where I talk about "building buzz."
|
| Basically, ads without ads.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28788169
| sebow wrote:
| Well some way along capitalism it was "found" that it's more
| effective to spend the money you could use to improve a
| product to actually brainwash people into buying the product
| (what would be ads here).
|
| Ultimately it's also our, the "mass consumers" fault for
| behaving this way, and for not upholding a certain value
| regarding choosing a more quality-oriented
| product/service.(and i might add: consuming less instead of
| more frequently)
|
| It's not really a fault of "capitalism", just reflects the
| commodity some people fall into.Ads were always there,and
| they always be, we just massively expanded the information
| mediums where ads could be implemented.
| dotBen wrote:
| The app stores typically tell you what permissions an app
| requires, including location.
|
| It would seem to me to be more efficient to programmatically
| analyze the permissions listed of the top 10,000 apps (or more)
| than have readers send in random screenshots.
| burkaman wrote:
| > This will help us understand how these prompts are worded and
| could help us identify apps that are using your location in
| ways the app developer does not disclose.
|
| They are specifically interested in how the location request is
| worded for each app, and maybe at what point during usage it
| asks. I think on Android the prompt is always the same, but
| apparently on iPhones they can add a short explanation.
| alufers wrote:
| You would get a lot of false positives, meaning apps that
| legitimately need the location. For example navigation apps or
| unfortunately apps on Android which use Bluetooth.
|
| This really annoys me, because the dialog looks the same for
| apps that want to use GPS data and apps that use Bluetooth, and
| there is no way to grant just Bluetooth permissions.
| soco wrote:
| And what do we do with apps which have a legitimate reason to
| use your location, then proceed to sale your location history
| to third parties? No confirmation dialog can save us from
| that.
| esc861 wrote:
| Yes, and the same goes for information about the WiFi
| network. Lots of apps for IoT devices require this
| information to set up products, but the OS presents this as
| location tracking.
| ascar wrote:
| Well, that's because scanning for WiFi networks and
| Bluetooth devices nearby effectively reveals your location.
|
| It might still make sense to split these permissions, but
| it should be clear that you're giving up your location.
| meibo wrote:
| This is fixed in Android 12, BLE and Location are properly
| disconnected now. The permission dialogue reads "determine
| relative position of nearby devices" if you request BLE
| access.
|
| You can also declare that your app "never needs physical
| location", which excludes BLE beacons that could be used for
| that purpose from the data the app receives.
|
| https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/blue.
| ..
| anothermoron wrote:
| I don't mind app that use my location for stuff which requires
| it, what this project is meant to do is find who SELLS the
| information.
| SilasX wrote:
| Yeah but that's not enough, I thought? Wasn't there that
| scandal where Uber figured out your location anyway from the
| WiFi access points you were near?
| dreyfan wrote:
| It's not just apps, it's the providers themselves. e.g. Sprint
| sells customer location/app/usage data directly [1]. They don't
| even try to obscure that fact.
|
| > "Leveraging verified, first-party mobile data from more than 32
| million mobile users straight off the network"
|
| [1] https://www.inmobi.com/company/press/inmobi-
| acquires-u.s.-ba...
| e40 wrote:
| The only solution to this is legislation. None of the
| politicians seem to care, I wonder why (follow the money...
| both sides of the isle are paid off).
| brewdad wrote:
| > both sides of the isle are paid off
|
| The expression is both sides of the aisle since traditionally
| each party sits on its own side of the legislative hall. I
| like this use however since it suggests they are all off on
| an island separate and distant from the rest of us.
| [deleted]
| mfrye0 wrote:
| A friend introduced me to localblox.com a couple years ago to get
| some company data, though it looks like they have already closed
| up shop.
|
| These guys seemed to have everyone's data. The demo started off
| by showing me the company data we were interested in, but then
| veered into picking a random person's life to delve into.
|
| The deep dive began by showing work/education info, then went
| into where they live, the cars they drove, how many kids/pets,
| then even deeper into the location data...
|
| They showed detailed maps of everywhere they went on a daily
| basis. The routes they took to work, they places the visited,
| etc.
|
| Any of the data was for sale if we wanted it. It was beyond
| disturbing. We obviously passed on working with them.
| RegW wrote:
| The article seems to make the assumption that this data is
| collected by apps that would otherwise have no good reason for
| requiring permission to access your location. Seems like a bit of
| an assumption.
|
| It strikes me that to build a useful location dataset, just one
| widely used app would be more effective than any number of niche
| apps asking for strange permissions. I would build an app that
| provides many people with a really useful service that obviously
| requires access to your location. So it would probably provide
| some sort of mapping or navigation service. To consistently
| collect data it might well force the user to have data enabled
| rather than just hold the map data on the phone.
|
| Perhaps I could also shut others out of this lucrative operation,
| if I could just get my app pre-installed and enabled by default
| on every phone.
|
| Just speculating - who really knows.
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(page generated 2021-10-07 23:01 UTC)