CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

https://www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-into-the-online-advertising-ecosystem-to-track-peoples-movements/

by ece • 5 months ago

530 201 5 months ago

404media.co

ece2• 5 months ago

https://archive.md/N3BZV

ChrisArchitect• 5 months ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47240343

giantg24• 5 months ago

So they say to turn of location permissions and stuff, but what about the network carrier? Any privacy focused cell services that are reasonably priced?

pocksuppet• 5 months ago

Don't think so - they're all very expensive because cell networks are expensive. You can get a burner phone, only use it as a tethered internet connection for your laptop which runs VPN software.

SoftTalker3• 5 months ago

Turn off the phone entirely.

kirth_gersen• 5 months ago

Most have internal batteries and are still "on" to a certain extent unless the battery is completely discharged.

giantg24• 5 months ago

I get that anything emitting can be tracked and stuff. I'm looking to take a baby step where I'm at least not having every possible detail recorded and sold. That Phreeli recommendation from another user seems like exactly what I want (paired with other things like a VPN of course).

iamnothere5• 5 months ago

Phreeli seems to be the privacy promoting MVNO with the cheapest options. Not sure if it’s been audited or what its guarantees are, but anything is probably better than the big carriers.

giantg24• 5 months ago

Thanks! This looks like what I want

drnick15• 5 months ago

Silent.link, jmp.chat

shevy-java• 5 months ago

We can not trust many "governments". The financial incentives are just too powerful. There are cases of people becoming millionaires after they left politics. Post-retirement payback and kickbacks.

pessimizer• 5 months ago

After they left? Try 6 months in.

HerbManic• 5 months ago

Yep, former prime ministers of Australia Kevin Rudd bought a house for $17 million. Do have to wonder were they got all that cash. And that is nothing exceptional, we see this in all manners of governments the world over.

lyu07282• 5 months ago

Israeli malware companies also use targeted ads to use drive-by exploits to infect people's devices using ad networks based on IP addresses:

https://securitylab.amnesty.org/latest/2025/12/intellexa-lea...

The fact that we still just allow arbitrary 3rd party code to run through ad networks is bizarre.

Terr_2• 5 months ago

The fact that we still just allow arbitrary 3rd party code to run through ad networks is bizarre.

It's interesting to imagine how things would change if those ad-networks were legally liable for their role in spreading scams and malware.

MiddleEndian• 5 months ago

Ad networks yes. Also the website operators and application developers.

apopapo• 5 months ago

Taxpayers' money used to track taxpayers and finance the advertising industry.

iamnothere5• 5 months ago

I can’t respond directly to octoclaw’s dead comment (edit: embarrassingly this was an LLM), but I will just say I agree, it is ridiculous both how cheap this data is and how many people aren’t aware of it. It’s not just governments who can get access, either.

This is another reason why you should not be carrying a phone everywhere except for times where you absolutely need one.

Luc• 5 months ago

It is dead because it is an LLM.

iamnothere5• 5 months ago

Wow, they are improving. None of the usual tells, fairly accurate. That’s a little concerning.

ramoz3• 5 months ago

From my experience this data is not cheap from an average consumer perspective.

iamnothere5• 5 months ago

Not for consumers but cheap for the people (mis)using it in bulk.

legitster3• 5 months ago

I work with Ad Data a lot in my job, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what this data that journalists love to propogate:

The location data in these networks is very inaccurate. Your OS and browser actually do a pretty good job of locking down your location data unless you give explicit permission. It's in the ad network's interests to lie about the quality of their data - so a lot of the "location" data is going to be a vaguely accurate guess based on your IP address.

But also, location data is really important to ads right now because, contrary to common perception, per user tracking is very, very hard. Each SDK might be tattling on you, but unless you give them a key to match you across apps, each signal from each app is unique. Which is why you are often served advertisements based on what other people on your network is searching - it's much easier to just blast everyone at that IP address than it is to find that specific user or device again in the data stream.

Bidstream data in particular is very fraught. You're only getting the active data at the point the add is served, but it's not easy to aggregate in any way. You'll be counting the same person separately dozens or hundreds of times with different identifiers for each. The data you get from something like Mobilewalla is not useful for tracking individuals so much as it's useful for finding patterns.

I think it's pretty telling from the few examples shared about how agencies actually use the data:

"CBP uses the information to “look for cellphone activity in unusual places,” including unpopulated portions of the US-Mexico border."
According to the Wall Street Journal, the IRS tried to use Venntel’s data to track individual suspects, but gave up when it couldn’t locate its targets in the company’s dataset.
In March 2021, SOCOM told Vice that the purpose of the contract was to “evaluate” the feasibility of using A6 services in an “overseas operating environment,” and that the government was no longer executing the contract

Something is going to have to be figured out about this data - realistically the only way is a sunset on customized advertisements. However, I would personally not be worried (yet) that the government is going to be able to identify an individual and track them down using these public sources as they currently are.

ducttape12• 5 months ago

Neither the government nor an ad agency needs to know where I am, no matter how "rough" the data is. It's none of their business.

legitster3• 5 months ago

At this point, your device is not giving anyone your location without explicit permission. So it really just comes down to your IP Address, which services do need.

jojobas• 5 months ago

The government does need to know where the people building their lives on breaking the law are. Don't think CBP wants to know where you are.

bigbuppo• 5 months ago

But dude... just think of all the optimal personalized mattres sales they can do with that data. I mean, people that use the bathroom at 3:57pm for seven minutes are 0.00138% more likely to buy a new mattress within the next six months. They need that data. Think of all the unsold mattresses.

d4mi3n• 5 months ago

Well, in the case of a company trying to market to you, it literally _is_ their business. It makes them money.

The problem is that we have markets where we: - Incentivize organizations to pursue profits at the expense of everything else, which includes social good and civic rights - Rarely hold bad actors accountable (and almost never in a timely manner)

Which means, given enough time, we're always going to trend to whatever makes the most money. Targeted advertising makes money, and will continue to do so unless or until we collectively decide to make it a greater risk to profits than it is today.

spike021• 5 months ago

i'm not confident they know where i am at all. i routinely get ads on social media for places (super random US states, cities, etc.) nowhere near where i live (SF Bay Area).

cm2012• 5 months ago

1000% agreed with this

dygd• 5 months ago

Each SDK might be tattling on you, but unless you give them a key to match you across apps, each signal from each app is unique

You'd be surprised what can be done when data from different source is fused together.

Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716

Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf

sroussey2• 5 months ago

There are whole companies that de-anon ad data as a service. Which gives the lots of data brokers the ability to not do the last mile and feel good about themselves. It’s a joke.

janalsncm2• 5 months ago

I remember when the first article was posted. Their method requires two parallel corpuses e.g. people who write on LinkedIn (under their real name) and Reddit.

Also, people who post under their real name are likely to write with their real voice:

Any deanonymization setup with ground truth introduces distributional biases. In our cross-platform datasets, the pro-files are likely easier to deanonymize than an average profile: the very fact that ground truth exists implies that the user may not have cared about anonymity in the first place. Similarly, two split-profiles of a single user are inherently alike, whereas two pseudonymous accounts of the same person (e.g., an official and a pseudonymous alt account) might expose more heterogeneous micro-data.

chaps4• 5 months ago

I worked in ad-tech for a year before I left the tech industry as a whole. I've also done a fair bit of investigative journalism.

Let me share a thing:

Factual, a company that specializes in hyperlocal geofencing, uses geofencing much smaller than the self-regulation that their industry allows in their own rules. I learned this after a coworker quit because our company was allowing ad targeting to people using these smaller geofences. The whole company had an all-hands about it where the CEO of the company told everyone that we were not going to stop using Factual nor the smaller-than-allowed geofences because we, ourselves, were not the ones to produce those geofences. We were just a man in the middle helping to build a system to track people at high resolution.

Please try to reconcile with what your industry has and continues to destroy.

gruez• 5 months ago

Please try to reconcile with what your industry has and continues to destroy.

I don't see anything contradictory between your comment and the OP. Having an amoral CEO who condones breaking geotargeting self-regulation doesn't contradict OP's claim that it's hard to tie geotargeting data in bidstreams back to a particular person.

arghwhat• 5 months ago

First thing would be that a small geofence (i.e., a narrow church on available data) is entirely orthogonal to having high precision, high quality location data available.

I won't claim with certainty that this is the case, but it seems likely that Factual was overselling their capabilities. That, or they relied specifically on having users grant high precision location data access and had nothing otherwise.

Apps that already need location data are probably the most likely sources of collecting such data - food apps, dating apps, chat apps you have sent your location in, ...

gib444• 5 months ago

unless you give them a key to match you across apps

Eg by running standard Android? That doesn't have eg secure app spawning, so apps can profile app initialisation data AIUI

And probably 10 other things behind the scenes that GrapheneÓS plugs?

ece2• 5 months ago

Exactly, people are going to be logged into these apps with trackable identifiers. You can see it with tracker control on android, download a new app and see existing apps report things to new trackers, which seems to be happening at the sdk level.

uncletammy• 5 months ago

Each SDK might be tattling on you, but unless you give them a key to match you across apps, each signal from each app is unique

Aren't there many examples of these? For example IMEI, IMSI, phone number, etc?

Even without "unique" signals, isn't it fairly trivial to identify a user with a handful of "not very unique" signals? User-agent, a few recent IP addresses, browser capabilities, list of installed apps, device operating system properties, etc?

ramoz3• 5 months ago

I worked closely to some of this. There were strict policies in place to never monitor US Citizens. That said i was focused in more kinetic warfare domains and not sure what would've extended past the borders by local law enforcements (DHS typically dictated no-us-soil policies). But, this is a money-hungry data pipeline of resellers and aggregators and they were always eager to sell more.

zoklet-enjoyer• 5 months ago

How do they determine if the person is a US citizen? I've sometimes wondered if my Google account is caught up in mass surveillance of non-Americans because I created my main email address while living in Australia, though I am a US citizen and only a US citizen. I haven't checked in a while, but I know that even in the US, checking my email on the web it would show that it was connecting to an Australian domain.

ramoz3• 5 months ago

It was typically isolated in procurement, only buying data from "outside of the border" - data was packaged by geo regions typically

jandrewrogers• 5 months ago

There are multiple cues in the data stream that let you tag the person with a country of residence even when traveling internationally. It isn't perfect but it is likely more than adequate in most cases.

The US government contracts with commercial data providers stipulate that all US data must be removed. There are quite a few regulatory controls that are adhered to.

blurbleblurble• 5 months ago

I can't help but wonder how much is being spent.

Sparkyte• 5 months ago

Why we need to use pihole more aggressively.

daft_pink2• 5 months ago

There’s literally a flock camera at basically every street location that one suburb borders another where I live.

There’s really not any legal practical way to avoid ALPRs.

I’m pretty sure the government knows where I am 24/7. I’m not going to worry about targeted advertising by the government anymore and just worry about it the people reselling it to non-governments for use.

mulmen4• 5 months ago

Weird take. Lots of examples recently of municipalities taking down Flock cameras. It's not a lost cause.

daft_pink2• 5 months ago

I think it’s possible in large cities, but seems unlikely that all small suburbs in an area you can get each suburb and some are very small to remove them. And that is just “possible” in large cities not reality. Who has the time to go from small locality to small locality.

orthoxerox• 5 months ago

That's Scroogled (2007) by Cory Doctorow! Life imitates art, again.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070920193501/http://www.radaro...

GaryBluto• 5 months ago

Thanks for that. Good story.

nine_k• 5 months ago

Not imitates but implements maybe.

godelski4• 5 months ago

It's a bit crazy how much we look back at that time and what people thought was tin foil haty. But that was written in 2007, still 6 years before Snowden. 7 years before the Director of the NSA (Hayden) told Congress they kill people based on metadata.

The invasion of privacy has been slow, creeping, and just waiting for that Turnkey Tyrant. We fooled ourselves into thinking we'd never elect someone who would turn that key. But in reality the key has been slowly turning, until finally it opened the latch

surround• 5 months ago

What You Can Do To Protect Yourself
1. Disable your mobile advertising ID
2. Review apps you’ve granted location permissions to.

I'm surprised they missed the most important step, which is blocking the advertisers from collecting your data in the first place. This is easily done in the browser with uBlock Origin and system-wide with DNS filtering.

chirau• 5 months ago

How do you do the system wide DNS filtering?

tartuffe78• 5 months ago

pihole is one way, though it's tricky to do it right

cdrnsf2• 5 months ago

I have 26 apps on my phone. Of those, four are Safari extensions, one is a PWA and another I wrote myself. I use a restrictive nextDNS profile that also blocks Apple's native tracking (as best they can) and don't use social media. I feel like that's the best I can realistically do.

azalemeth• 5 months ago

...and the phone itself broadcasts your position to the cell towers with remarkable accuracy, 24 hours a day.

cdrnsf2• 5 months ago

Hence the "realistically" qualifier.

raw_anon_1111• 5 months ago

And you do realize your cellphone is constantly sharing your location with your cell phone company which is more than willing to give it to the government without a warrant.

Whatever you are doing is meaningless privacy theatre

Computer0• 5 months ago

They are probably actively providing that information. At AT&T we still are working very closely with the NSA.

beepbooptheory• 5 months ago

This makes sense to me but then why is CBP here needing/wanting to pay for ad data if they can just ask the ISPs/cell phone companies?

drnick15• 5 months ago

I wouldn't call that meaningless privacy theater. For one, you can buy a SIM anonymously, and make the cell location data essentially useless. Second, protection at the DNS level prevents other types of data exfiltration (such as cross-site tracking by the Meta Pixel). By not using social media and communicating over secure apps like Signal, you can indeed achieve a high degree of resistance against tracking and profiling.

Of course, you can do more, such as running only trusted software (i.e., free software) on your devices, not using Internet-of-Shit devices anywhere in your home, and making sure your car is not snooping on you through it's own cellular modem.

heisenbit• 5 months ago

You phone company has a pretty good idea where you are all the time. This is well known and therefore there are strict rules, regulations and often laws preventing share this without good cause. As long as telco or law enforcement adheres to the law (hmm) this data is not available for fishing expeditions.

theropost• 5 months ago

It always kinda amazes me how people panic about gov data use but barely blink at the private sector doing the exact same thing… except way less transparently.

Like yeah, sure, governments collecting data deserves scrutiny. 100%. But at least in most democracies there are audits, oversight bodies, privacy commissioners, courts, access to information laws, etc. There are actual mechanisms where someone can ask “why are you doing this?” and force an answer.

Meanwhile we hand over our location, browsing habits, shopping patterns, sleep schedule, and probably our favorite pizza topping to dozens of private companies every day. Those companies can aggregate it, sell it, profile you, feed it into ad markets, train models with it, or ship it across borders… and most of the time nobody outside the company even knows it’s happening.

So yeah, data collection in general is worth debating. But the irony is wild when people lose their minds over the one place that at least has some governance and accountability, while the entire private ad-tech ecosystem is basically “trust us bro” with a 40-page terms of service nobody reads.

drnick15• 5 months ago

I am surprised the article does not mention obvious mitigation strategies, including network-wide DNS blacklists, browser ad blockers, and not using proprietary apps on phones.

h4kunamata• 5 months ago

For years, the internet advertising industry has been sucking up our data, including our location data

For years, people have been sharing everything they do, what they do, people they spent time with, where they live.

Advertisement industry just adds more info to complete your profile, what you buy, what you watch, what you speak online, etc.

keybored2• 5 months ago

People here complain that programmers aren’t engineers because real engineers can accidentally kill people and get sued if they mess an equation up. Instead of just breaking a build or something.

I think it’s more concerning that programmers seem to have no care or shame about designing systems that works against the users’ interests. Did you share something intimate in our chat? Well it’s not E2E, moron, we have that now. How could you be this stupid?

I can’t think of another profession (except pure value extraction types) which revels in exploiting people for not having the time or care to arrange their digital lives around the booby traps that nerds set for them.

vasco• 5 months ago

A thief thinks everyone steals.

hn_acc12• 5 months ago

As an old-school programmer who thought computers would improve people's lives back in the 80s when I was a wide-eyed teenager.. I am constantly appalled by the current generation of SV people who are very right-leaning and are happy to steal anything and everything they can. It didn't seem like this 20 years ago when I started. I hate the advertising industry with a passion.

Anecdotally, it feels like it fits right in with the "if there's no cop around to give me a ticket, I can drive however I want" attitude I've seen post-Covid. People entering two-way turn lanes or HOV merge lanes to PASS people in the main lane. People going through stop signs without any stopping while I'm waiting for my turn. Using the HOV on-ramp lane with only the driver to merge onto the freeway where it's clearly marked "24 hour HOV lane", etc.

It's as if the entire social compact evaporated during/after Covid, and "everyone only out for themselves" is the norm now.

Or maybe I'm just more aware of it and more cynical.

jcgrillo• 5 months ago

It really cannot be both ways--the tech industry cannot both be producing critical infrastructure and be immune from liability. We've tried this experiment before, and millions suffered and died needlessly. We have electrical codes, building codes, automotive safety standards, etc., because many, many people died preventable deaths. With the amount of leverage tech has over the economy I don't think it's reasonable that we don't have software engineering codes and professional accountability. But I have absolutely no confidence we'll get there until there are multiple deadly catastrophes over a series of decades.

drdaeman• 5 months ago

I’m afraid you don’t understand humans. Yeah, if you completely strip every detail you get a picture like that, a very convenient one to blow all the righteous steam on some amorphous homogeneous “programmers” mass. World is not simple, it’s the opposite of that.

When a poor lad comes on a work visa and is elevated from a literal poverty to a somewhat decent standard of living, would you expect them to stand up and make sure some camera recordings can’t be used in a way they aren’t supposed to be used? Do you expect them to even consider if their management may abuse that some years in the future (when the code is an unholy mess of duct tape and all the effort goes into making it work for the stated purpose), when their mind is all busy thinking about bills, health, family abroad, and the general sense of doom impending with pandemics and wars and extreme corruption all around? Nah, that lad’s also being exploited here, not exploiting others. Not that any sins are absolved but he’s a lot less of a monster than your comment paints. And there are corporations with tens of thousands of such lads and lasses and other folks. And that’s just one of myriad of possible nuances that break the trope of evil programmers screwing the world up.

Blame the rot that starts at the head, it’d be at least a bit more accurate.

I can’t think of another profession

That’s because you framed the criteria so narrowly that it includes almost only programmers. And even then you still confused between management and implementors. And even then you’re forgetting the management, who’s definitely more to blame than workers.

tototrains• 5 months ago

Duh, what do you think we were building for the last 10 years? Does anyone with two brain cells think that corporate surveillance wasn't going to be co-opted by authoritarianism?

The only people who didn't understand this were either delusional or being paid not to.

pelotron• 5 months ago

Well I didn't expect the leopards to eat _my_ face.

hsbauauvhabzb• 5 months ago

I’m not sure that’s fair, the majority of the American population are pretty dumb due to the poor education system. Most weren’t alive for WW2 so they’ve not come very close to an authoritarian threat in the past either.

coliveira2• 5 months ago

The poor education system is correct, but that is by design.

coliveira2• 5 months ago

Yes, some people really didn't expect that billionaires without any moral compass would do this...

SV_BubbleTime• 5 months ago

I wonder how many people upset about this have ring cameras on their houses?

hightrix• 5 months ago

Yet another reminder that everyone everywhere should be blocking all ads all the time. I don't say that lightly as absolutes tend to not be the appropriate solution, but an absolute stance of blocking ads is appropriate.

derwiki• 5 months ago

100%, this has been my soap box for years.

A very easy, effective, multi-layer setup:

1. Browser adblocker

2. Pi hole running locally

3. Pi hole at your home network router level

And 4, not as easy but effective, a firewall like Little Snitch

Edit: the other good news is your old data loses value quickly, so starting today is still very effective: you haven’t missed the boat yet!

Zak3• 5 months ago

This doesn't cover in-app adds on phones over mobile data, which is probably the main vector for the tracking discussed in the article. For that:

1. Adblocking via private DNS (e.g. https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls)

2. Prefer websites over native apps wherever possible

3. Browser adblocker

Hosts file adblocking is also possible on a phone where you have root.

dzdt• 5 months ago

Is this something European style privacy laws would protect against? Though given the US political situation we are far from being able to enact any kind of anti-authoritarian protections...

paxys• 5 months ago

You can enact all the laws you want, but what do you do when the government in charge just ignores them?

wat100003• 5 months ago

You can increase your chances by crafting the laws differently, at least.

A law that says the government can't ask for this stuff doesn't help very much. They'll ignore it when it suits them.

A law that says it's illegal for private companies to hand it over would be better. When caught between a request from the government and a law that says they're not allowed to honor that request, there's a good chance they'll obey the law rather than the rogue agency.

A law that says it's illegal for private companies to collect this data in the first place would be even better. It could still be worked around, but it's more likely to be uncovered, and they'd only get data after the point where they convinced a company to start collecting it.

refulgentis• 5 months ago

“Would European-style privacy laws protect against this?” is the kind of question that sounds more clarifying than it actually is, because it collapses about five separate problems into one vague gesture at “Europe.”

The issue here isn’t simply “lack of privacy law.” It’s:

1. apps collecting precise location data in the first place,

2. adtech infrastructure broadcasting that data through RTB,

3. brokers aggregating and reselling it,

4. government agencies buying it to avoid the constraints that would apply if they tried to collect it directly, and

5. regulators failing to stop any of the above in a meaningful way.

European law is relevant to some of that, but not as a magic shield. GDPR and ePrivacy principles are obviously more restrictive on paper than the US free-for-all, especially around consent, purpose limitation, data minimization, and downstream reuse. But “on paper” is doing a lot of work there. Europe has had years of complaints about RTB specifically, and yet the adtech ecosystem did not exactly disappear. That should tell you something.

So the real answer is: yes, a stronger privacy regime can help, but no, this is not a problem that gets solved by vaguely importing “European-style privacy laws” as a concept. If the underlying business model still allows mass collection, opaque sharing, and resale of location data, then state access is a policy choice away. Governments don’t need to build a panopticon if the commercial sector already did it for them.

Also, the most important legal question here is not just whether private companies should be allowed to collect/sell this data. It’s whether the government should be allowed to buy commercially available data to do an end-run around constitutional and statutory limits. That is a distinct issue. You need rules for both the commercial market and state procurement, otherwise the state just shops where the Fourth Amendment doesn’t reach.

In other words, the contrast is not “Europe = protected, US = authoritarian.” The contrast is between systems that at least attempt to constrain collection and reuse, and systems that let surveillance markets mature first and ask questions later. Even in Europe, enforcement gaps, law-enforcement carveouts, and institutional incentives matter enormously.

So if the goal is to understand the story, the useful question isn’t “would Europe stop this?” It’s “what combination of collection limits, resale bans, procurement bans, audit requirements, and enforcement would actually make this impossible in practice?” Anything short of that is mostly aesthetics.

kolektiv• 5 months ago

Very clearly put, and I'd only emphasise that without the final "enforcement" point of that, the other points become entirely irrelevant. While European regulators have imposed some significant sounding fines on prominent entities, they generally work out to be "less than the value gained by doing the thing in the first place" - or at least close enough to that for the entity to not consider it too negative/a future deterrent.

Unless you have some body which is a) serious about enforcement, b) sufficiently toothful to make a dent and c) not undermined by wider geopolitical posturing or economic neutering, you can have all of the regulation you might want and still end up in the same place. I'm not arguing that we shouldn't try and control this, but that we have some extremely large genies to stuff back into bottles along the way.

Macha• 5 months ago

So if:

- you always denied those popups

- .. including any hidden legitimate interest sections that are being treated as a second, opt-out "consent" for things that really don't actually qualify as legitimate interest

- and the companies actually followed it

Then in theory the companies won't have that data. But doing 1 is tedious, companies exercise dark patterns to avoid you doing 2, and it's hard to audit if they've done 3, so most people are probably in those data sets.

Also, a government likely to buy this data for purposes like in the original article, is unlikely to be the type of government that goes around slapping companies for not complying with privacy regulation on that data.

Zak3• 5 months ago

I have never regretted my decision to aggressively block ads on every device I use, and to shun devices where I can't.

Cider9986• 5 months ago

I am not sure that ad blocking is enough now or in the future as fingerprinting is extremely hard to fight while keeping a convenient web experience. Of course, continue blocking for convenience, but for privacy, more robust solutions are needed. Try to beat this: https://fingerprint.com

andai• 5 months ago

Doesn't this just identify you as "that one guy who blocks fingerprinting"?

It's similar to when you use Linux or an obscure privacy-preserving browser. You've made yourself way more unique just by doing that.

(I'm not sure how the math works out though, vs. actually running all that nasty tracking stuff.)

LPisGood• 5 months ago

iPhone with private relay seems to defeat that

Zak3• 5 months ago

I beat it with Firefox, UBO, standard Firefox advanced tracking protection, and a VPN.

It was able to track me as long as my IP address didn't change, but as soon as I switched VPN endpoints, it gave me a new identifier.

PostOnce• 5 months ago

Beginning to wonder if convenience is the root of all evil, and not money. Money's just a proxy for convenience.

More of us should learn to do things the hard way more often, and to be familiar with less-convenient things. There are life-changing advantages to doing things the hard way at least some of the time.

allthetime2• 5 months ago

What does "try to beat this" mean?

I just opened it in another browser and got another ID. Did I win?

For some reason using Microsoft Edge is deemed suspicious.

giobox2• 5 months ago

The EFF's fingerprint test is nice in that it breaks down a lot of the bits of data used, and lets you know how you compare etc:

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

You quickly discover how difficult it really is to avoid a unique fingerprint.

Lots of folks in this thread are focusing on DNS and VPN to avoid detection, which of course can help, but a huge number of identifiable bits come from your browser's APIs:

User Agent

Screen Size and Color Depth

System Fonts

Hash of canvas fingerprint

Hash of WebGL fingerprint

WebGL Vendor & Renderer

Touch Support

AudioContext fingerprint

Hardware Concurrency

Device Memory

Platform

Language

Timezone

Timezone offset

Browser Plugin Details

etc etc

Scrounger5• 5 months ago

Try to beat this: https://fingerprint.com

I beat it, I think... nothing much there. I use a VPN and NextDNS.io.

t0lo• 5 months ago

Use Mullvad Browser or Brave (both require no extensions to block ads, with mullvad browser being modelled off of tor. Use data traffic fingerprint obfuscation even behind vpn (yes they can tell if you're messaging, watching a video, torrenting, etc 90% of the time even behind vpn) use mullvads daita (makes packets the same size) or nymvpn (mixnet with tor like routing and in built delays). Tor doesn't protect against traffic analysis at all.

newscracker• 5 months ago

Try to beat this: https://fingerprint.com

I don’t know, but it seems like it’s overselling its capabilities. I tried with Firefox Focus and it said I’m using incognito (private mode) and assigned a unique visitor ID. Immediately tried with a private tab in Safari on iOS and it said I’m not using incognito (private mode) and assigned a new unique visitor ID. Then I switched networks and tried. One more unique visitor ID.

I’m not claiming that fingerprinting is not possible, but this website is not good at it. Seems like it uses plain cookies.

pabs3• 5 months ago

"Enable JS to run the demo"

UltraSane3• 5 months ago

The Web is utterly unusable without uBlock Origin.

trinsic25• 5 months ago

I cant see how people use the net without it.. My wife gets all these ad popups and she is so use to it that it doesn't even register until I point it out.

SmirkingRevenge2• 5 months ago

Honestly, ublock isn't even enough anymore. DNS sinkholes are the next layer, since they work device-wide. I use nextdns.io, and it's good enough that I just keep ublock around in case I need to disable nextdns for some reason.

dakolli4• 5 months ago

uBlock Origin does not protect you from this, this is a fingerprinting problem. You need to use a fingerprinting resistant browser. And even then, there are new fingerprinting methods emerging frequently and you can't prevent fingerprinting from inside apps on android/iOs..

Most slop mobile applications, that many people have on their phones are basically spyware pretending to be games/whatever.

Programatic advertising technology was created for intelligence purposes, these companies and their methods are very sophisticated.

monster_truck• 5 months ago

You will also want to turn off things like weather widgets, basically anything that hits an external service.

hn_acc12• 5 months ago

I run as few apps as possible, use Firefox / Ublock on my phone. I do play the odd card game (ad-supported), but only 1 or 2 times a month. I may just buy the app outright at some point.

Does sharing location with family (Android) leak any data?

inaros• 5 months ago

You can also use the ecosystem for useful stuff:

"Jeffrey Epstein’s Island Visitors Exposed by Data Broker" - https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-...

vjvjvjvjghv• 5 months ago

I always thought these massive surveillance systems private companies are building will eventually used by governments. The Nazis, Stalin or now North Korea would be supper happy to access the data companies are accumulating aggressively.

jmward012• 5 months ago

I am evolving my views on personal privacy. I am, like many people, trying to passively defend myself. However, the environment today is more akin to people coming up and punching you than it is to just avoiding door to door sales people. We are being actively attacked, and real harm is being caused. People are loosing their entire livelihoods, or worse, to attacks on their privacy like this. At the moment all I see out there is sit there and take it. Nothing I do will keep my life private in a meaningful way. The best I can hope for is that companies wont tell me too loudly that they know when I go to the bathroom and how heavy I am, they will just show me targeted ads that prove they know those things and sell my data so corrupt agencies can decide how best to abuse it, legally. So, what options are left if the only tool you are given is sit there and take it but nobody is actually defending you?

trinsic25• 5 months ago

Im not sure I understand your point. You can still work to protect your privacy and it will get better slowly over time IMHO.

There are services out their that help you with the data that is already out there on you.

jmward012• 5 months ago

You think privacy is getting better over time? Honestly? Is there any credible source that is documenting privacy in the US getting better?

3RTB2972• 5 months ago

We're at a place where browser fingerprinting is what you have to defeat in order to not be tracked online, it goes a lot further than signing up for DeleteMe.

All DeleteMe does is save you the time of manually making takedown requests, which is not that onerous in the first place. I've done plenty of my own. But that doesn't prevent online advertising databases from profiling me or you. And it's been happening for years - this isn't new at all.

https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ad...

shepherdjerred• 5 months ago

https://adnauseam.io/

dfxm12• 5 months ago

You're right, individually, we don't have the power to protect ourselves, especially passively. Call your lawmakers. Call any lawmaker who will listen. You probably have a primary election coming up soon. Ask the candidates what their stance is on this & make an informed vote. If they aren't sure, explain the situation to them. Do the same in November.

kyleee• 5 months ago

Just another confirmation that everyone should be blocking ads as aggressively as humanly (and AI-ly) as possible

hahajk• 5 months ago

It's unfortunate the Privacy Act included an exception for law enforcement. I imagine at the time it wasn't clear that every action taken by the govt would be called law enforcement.

There is an ethical framework for handling personal data collected and maintained by the US govt called the Fair Information Practice Principles (https://www.fpc.gov/resources/fipps/).

It really is too bad that "any legal purpose" is the stated boundary for our elected govt rather than a more noble appeal to public service.

throwaway85825• 5 months ago

Laws aren't the problem here. If the data exists it will be abused, if not by the government then by corrupt insiders.

jonhohle• 5 months ago

Reminds me of a farmer who found a snake one winter.

ornornor• 5 months ago

PSA: Firefox + uBlock origin (uBO is neutered in chromium and chrome now), along with NextDNS for your other devices blocks the vast majority of ads everywhere.

notepad0x90• 5 months ago

If you build it, they'll come.

_slih• 5 months ago

the whole point of buying ad-tech data is that purchasing doesn't have the legal requirements that collecting does

3RTB2972• 5 months ago

A week after I started doing OSINT research, I realized how much very personal data I had online. Much more than I wanted. Years ago I went down the privacy rabbit hole and realized how bad all of this was. And that was before it took off around 2019 and really ramped up a year ago.

It's not uncommon, but always disappointing to me, to see how out of touch most HN folks are when it comes to privacy and data. Usually privacy is dismissed as hyperbole, or tinfoil hat stuff, or only for people selling drugs on the darknet. It's not anymore. The minimum barrier to entry for simply not having your every thought and whim and search catalogued is high: Masking your IP address, masking your browser fingerprint, and simply not participating in a lot of parts of the internet.

These are your thoughts, your personal life, being dissected and catalogued and sold in an attempt to, at BEST, shape your behavior. At worst, see exactly when you cross the line into becoming "an agitator." It's the step you need before getting to "thoughtcrime." Why is this acceptable to anyone??? In exchange for free email?

We're all in the pot and the water is already starting to bubble. And I'm sure that the only replies I might get will be "Oh, but no, it's not anything like that." Sure.

This is simply the first time you're seeing it on US soil. https://www.wired.com/story/how-pentagon-learned-targeted-ad...

Yet two years ago, look how many people were incredulous, doubtful, or simply didn't care. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39540738

Maybe now is a good time to bring up KOSA? Or maybe we should discuss that two years from now when it's too late to change anything.

https://www.eff.org/document/kids-online-safety-act-kosa https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/kids-online-safety-act...

evolighting• 5 months ago

privacy data it self is merely the case;

The real problem is that tech giants only need to claim that their use of data is appropriate, and they can then feel free to use it to provide "better" services.

After all, they should never have been allowed to do this from the very beginning. Users aren't fools—they can learn too. So what we need isn't automatic push, but easier ways to actively seek things out.

rolandog• 5 months ago

Honest question, wouldn't the Ad Topics proposal by Google have shifted away from all this data being leaked during bids? IIRC, advertisers would've received something like 4 words to specify your interests. Maybe I'm misremembering.

Stancyhd8• 5 months ago

I suspected my husband of cheating on me, and I reached Henryclarkethicalhacker at g mail com , and he helped me discover the truth. I could monitor his phone remotely without touching it, making the process easier and less time-consuming. The step-by-step guide was also very helpful, showing me exactly what I needed to do

matrixo• 4 months ago

The comments from this account seem to be the same: out of context advertisements for this 'service'...

CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements

Related Stories