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> T-Mobile uses network-level tools to track the apps that people use on their phones How does this work? Does it use heuristics to associate traffic patterns
by car_analogy 4y ago
> T-Mobile uses network-level tools to track the apps that people use on their phones
How does this work? Does it use heuristics to associate traffic patterns or server IPs with apps? Or packet inspection for apps that don't encrypt traffic?
> Should every tap on your phone be tracked and monetized? I would hope not.
These articles always treat implementation details so infuriatingly casually. There's a vast gulf between analyzing traffic patterns, and installing spyware to report on "every tap", as this sentence implies.
- throwaway81523 4y ago> Does it use heuristics to associate traffic patterns or server IPs with apps? That's what it sounded like to me. > There's a vast gulf between analyzing traffic patterns, and installing spyware to report on "every tap", as this sentence implies. I didn't see an implication that every tap was currently being tracked. Only an inference that this is what the marketeers really want, and that allowing such desires to run rampant would be a bad thing. It still baffles me that people see massive surveillance as benign because they think the end result is merely relatively ignorable targeted advertisements.
- Sephr 4y ago> How does this work? I don't know myself, but it's possible that they are simply reading unencrypted SNI fields from TLS connections. SNI exposes the website hostnames that you connect to.
- throwaway-blaze 4y agoBingo.
- throwaway-blaze 4y agoThey have built a dictionary mapping the hostnames your phone talks to when certain apps are used (i.e. uber app talks to xxxx.uber.com). Altho there are millions of apps, they only need to have this dictionary for the "top" apps used by most people. Note they're not using DNS records, but rather the SNI portion of the HTTPS requests made by the phone.