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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

When an app gathers information on someone - for example via the microphone - how does it assign the data to a person?

Say the person says "I will buy a new car next week". Now what? How will the ad agency bombard the person with car ads? I mean outside of the one app that has gathered the information?

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They have various fingerprints including email logins and device ids. So then Google says tekmolAtGmail likes cars and lines up the perfect advertiser for you!

How would the email end up in the ad system? Isn't it just a library the app developer includes and that runs in the background? Does it interact with the user and ask for their email?

And fingerprinting? Even if the fingerprint is unique - now what? They still could only target the user while the user is using apps that are complicit in this advertising scheme, right?

I am not an expert in these systems but it seems some have tremendous ability to link disparate data. At the simplest they have things like device IDs and emails from logged in users that make it easy; many users don’t or can’t opt out of the baseline tracking. If you do well now you’re special so they have to use other fingerprinting techniques. You can try and obfuscate which might change your ad package but they still know everything about you.

I think your belief that they can only target while using the app is naive. They can sell the data to aggregators for more sophisticated use.

Most(?) apps require a login now, so they have the users email address.

Not an expert but I'd assume they keep track of the public IP of the device. When a site has bought this information and receives a request, they can record the link between person and account, so this needs to happen only once. On top of that you've got additional fingerprinting techniques to improve the accuracy.

"Asking for a friend"?

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