The global surveillance free-for-all in mobile ad data

I don't think the nature of the data collection was clear and have been creeping up on us.

It took a while for me to realize. E.g. I didn't notice Google was spying on me and stalking on non Google sites until I finally realized it.

Anything can wear people down— make it seem as if it were always normal, even— if it's just persistent enough.

All the more reason it should have been nipped in the bud, I guess.

I assumed this was only based on voter registration party-spam.

That's awful.

And did those political SMSs honor opt-out requests or not?

Are they even? Or, can they know that? If the suspect has a gun, they'll wake up scared, confused, and with every reason to believe somebody's illegally breaking and entering.

https://nextdns.io

How do you know this is the case? (I believe it to be, would like to verify)

Also worth mentioning many apps hardcode DNS servers or fallback to other DNS providers when they fail to resolve hostnames. I see this all the time on my network. (I have a PfSense box that redirects to upstream NextDNS when this happens)

You create a server and host it on IP x. You create a cert for it. You add the public key to your app.

Your app can now communicate with that IP over port 443 with that certificate. Remember that the idea that the domain must match the one in the certificate is a setting, enforced by the browsers. If you run your own code you can perfectly override that.

Now you can do whatever you like on that connection.

In fact, you don't HAVE to go that far. Many applications these days do private key pinning and use that connection to load the ads. IMDb does that on the iPhone.

MyQ and myBMW use the same to 'protect' the connection. MyQ's implementation of this, and subsequent implementation of CloudFlare's bot protection completely broke home-assistant's connection. All because they want you to use their app (and get bombarded with ads).

Doh/DoT was supposed to bring in MORE privacy for users, as it allowed users to resolve addresses without the system servicing the connection (ISP / StarBucks / McDonald's) from being able to see or modify the responses (think captive pages).

But all it brought was more spying. I am a firm believer that I should be able to inspect all traffic that an application sends out over my internet connection.

Bad traffic could flow to a "good" domain, and then you need to decide whether that domain is actually "good".

At a societal level we fully deserve all this because apparently we can't be fucked to care about basic rights anymore (cf. "everyone gets the government they deserve"), too lost in Huxley's dystopian future of infinite dopamine distractions.

We're all proud of you but this is barely related to avoiding ads. You can build your own car too, and you'd still have to look at the billboards on the highway. Or you could build your own phone and never giving anyone the number, then you'll still get to enjoy 5 spams/day during election season when someone decides to simply call every phone number in the region.

Ads are the new certainty besides death and taxes. If they aren't in your face yet, be assured that whole legions of shitheads are very busy trying to make it happen.

The advertising industry is so large that it's basically private taxation, except that you get nothing in return from it.

The problem with online ads is mostly orthogonal to FOSS. Of course, it does help to not use an OS with ads baked into the Start menu...

Our information paradigm has changed; so should advertising. Let consumers seek out new products, if they wish to.

Let consumers who are searching for product information be given advertising. Contain the virus to ecosystems that want it.

If you look at old ads for random products from e.g. the turn of the (last) century, they seem to often give this slight "wall of text" impression. Image of the product, surrounded by prices and descriptions of what it was and what it (purportedly) did. The motivating belief seemed to be that if a company communicated the benefits of buying from them, they would attract customers.

It seems like at some point the focus shifted away from expressing factual information, and to creating vague associations and implications. I think that's still fine on its own, and in fact quite fun and the source of a lot of creativity, but it also created the opportunity to mislead in new ways. E.G. most famously harmfully maybe, the very mid-20th century idea that cigarettes are "cool". In modern times this seems to have gone even further towards exploiting basic quirks in human psychology— A dancing bear, chocolate man, or screaming celebrity has nothing to do with selling a product, but it's bizarre and surprising and therefore memorable, so by making an ad around it you're cluttering the viewer's brain with useless information designed to redirect mindshare to your capital-B "Brand".

So at that point it becomes dishonest and manipulative. But at least it's still broadcasted, e.g. on radio, TV, in newspapers and magazines. It's predatory, but everyone gets the same thing. You can still sorta avoid or ignore it. It doesn't single anyone out.

That's changed now with the Internet. The mass collection of location and personality data, identifiable to individual profiles and paired with tools allowing those individuals to be targetted with a combination of terrifying granularity and omnipresent scale— That adds an entire new dimension to "advertising", and it would still be wrong, because it would still comprise many violations of privacy and basic decency, even if it weren't being actively exploited for commercial gain. If any one individual knew as much about you and had as many tools for trying to influence you as Facebook and Google have built on an industrial scale, they would be either a stalker deserving of a restraining order, or some kind of a (probably malevolent TBH) supernatural spirit.

So "advertising", in terms of "informing the market of a product" and "connecting customers to businesses in mutually beneficial transactions", is fine I guess. Good, even. Stalking, lying, manipulating, and rent-seeking through dominance are wrong.

And with technology centralizing power in the hands of a few organizations, the modern practice of "advertising" seems to be less about "informing people" these days and more about dominating the information space in order to manipulate human behaviour with neither the consent nor the knowledge of your targets. No wonder it's apparently being abused by law enforcement.

...To be clear, I use the word "you" only as an indefinite pronoun here. Small businesses that use ad networks aren't the ones to blame for a large system having messy incentives and malicious central actors.

They've tried that approach but it's actually less efficient than "good old fashioned police work" because it turns out that 99/100 of your hits are gonna be lawful weirdos, 1/100 is gonna be a petty drug dealer and the career advancing prosecution you actually wanted would have been much easier to find by using normal methods like inferring that a dealer has a supplier, a spy has a handler, etc, etc and trying to suss out who those people are. The NSA figured all this out post 9/11 when they were building data haystacks in search of terrorists.

What the data haystacks do get used for is dragnet policing wherein an agency picks some crime they're gonna go hard on, pulls up a bunch of results of people who probably did it, tosses all the people who are likely to pose any risk to them (e.g. you don't see the ATF knocking on doors asking about Temu glock switches in bad parts of Detroit) and kicks in the doors of whoever's left.

The data haystacks are also really useful for witch hunts when they get egg on their face and need to make someone pay, like that time they prosecuted anyone and everyone who they could construe as having done anything to help the kid who bombed the Boston Marathon, and the January 6 people of whom a great number were certainly just hapless.

And this is in addition to the usual "opposition research" like the FBI bugging MLK and all that sort of crap.

Also, people are influenced by what other people say, especially people in tech. You can see people on HN saying how hopeless it all is. People on HN and your social circle are listening to what you say.

They managed to outsource it on accident just because of a shared need with advertisers to target people.

> One DEA official had told Reuters: "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day. It's decades old, a bedrock concept."

Constitution or not, they're doing it.

There are popular third-party libraries, used by apps, offering whatever functionality.

Those third-party libraries do deals with whoever, to include into the library whatever code it is the whoever wants to get out onto a ton of phones.

I worked for a company in Germany, who wanted to get some Bluetooth base station detection functionality out into phones, so they could track people.

Company put Bluetooth base stations into a bunch of locations, and then paid a major third-party library to include their code.

Bingo. One week later, millions of phones being tracked.

When you install an app, you are in fact installing God knows what from shady friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, who's got money.

Do not install commercial apps. Only install open source apps. Anything else, you're going to be abused, whether you know it or not.

say, my parents own phones but don't do much on them except navigation, photos, messaging, and web browsing. if you're not into Uber, Doordash, mobile banking, and so on, then you're not really giving up much by switching to the alternatives.

generally, it's harder to _remove_ something from your life than it is to forego _adding_ it. if you're content with the functionality of your tech as it exists today, then a feasible route to de-apple/de-google really is to just not start doing too much _new_ with it, and within some number of years you'll find the alternatives have developed to the point where you can switch to them without going backward.

I think it could work. You can call, text (probably hard, I remember those swipe-out keyboards) so you should be good in an emergency. But that's it - the rest you do on your desktop, where you have far greater control over the software you use and far less data available (no location, no photos, etc).

The trouble is there's some gaps. If you want decent pictures, you'll need a camera. If you want to do something simple like check your email, it's a whole thing.

It's a passable measure of the financial class's wealth, which is not the same thing at all.

The use of GDP as the headline number in demagoguery is a psyop

Actually thinking about it a bit more with 5G being so short range I can see how a social graph could be made. I do have 5G turned off on my phone though because I don’t know what benefit it gives me because if the 4g tower is already not overloaded bc other people are on the local 5g