5 ms·
Here is the interesting part: > If my phone is regularly in the same GPS location as another phone, they take note of that. They start reconstructing the web o
by shoto_io 5y ago
Here is the interesting part:
> If my phone is regularly in the same GPS location as another phone, they take note of that. They start reconstructing the web of people I'm in regular contact with.
> So. They know my mom's toothpaste. They know I was at my mom's. They know my Twitter. Now I get Twitter ads for mom's toothpaste.
- politelemon 5y agoI think he's arrived at the wrong conclusion. It's more likely because he shared an IP address with the original targeted user (mother). Occam's IP. That said, I'd expect a privacy tech worker to have adblocking on their devices and such a thing to not happen in the first place.
- modeless 5y agoYes, whenever these stories come around, 90% of the time it can be explained by shared IP. It's not GPS. It's not microphones. It's not cameras. It's actually simple. You connected to someone's WiFi. You got their public IP. It's a unique 32-bit number, easiest thing in the world to store and associate. Now you are associated for a while and get some of the same ads.
- shoto_io 5y agoWhich in turn is a good thing, right? Because people seem to get pooled together and the ads aren't clever enough to distinguish.
- politelemon 5y agoQuite interesting, I hadn't even thought of it this way. In a way, VPNs could be pretty useful in this regard, as you share the same IP as several other people. So you'd be subject to irrelevant ads about the same topic that most of them are searching for.
- SyzygistSix 5y agoI assume that even though I use a vpn and have ads blocked almost completely, my browser is fingerprinted and my phone tracked so that I'm giving valuable data almost all the time anyway.
- bpodgursky 5y agoLot of advertising targeting doesn't bother going below the household level anyway, which IP sorta-kinda corresponds to.
- amelius 5y agoWhy is this a good thing? If I follow someone to a number of different locations with Wifi, then I can learn a lot about them by using a simple intersection of the ads I'm now getting. For instance, if I get ads about diapers in all locations, then I have a strong reason to conclude that the person I'm following is pregnant or has a baby.
- shoto_io 5y agoIf you follow someone that closely from location to location you won't need to cross check your ads to learn stuff about them, I guess.
- erhk 5y agoWell it sounds like one router will tell me about toothpaste so why not diapers
- amelius 5y agoWell, there is this classic example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
- modeless 5y agoI don't really consider it a good thing. I think VPNs should be the default for everyone. But yes, it means that ad networks aren't surreptitiously listening to your spoken conversations. They are just doing the most brain-dead obvious correlations.
- afterburner 5y agoIt's bad that they're trying to track you in any way.