Give permission. Don't give permission. They know where you are anyway

[muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee]

Route all or traffic through tor. Never log into anything. Never use the same identity twice. Ahh and live in a hut in the woods never going to shops or cities that have security cameras.

[monkdervierte@lemmy.ml]

...where are chains allowed to abuse security camera footage for ad tracking?

[hendrik@palaver.p3x.de]

I think it's more: "Don't use a smartphone". It'll send those requests through any internet connection. No matter if it's a VPN.

[misk@sopuli.xyz]

Does this happen to users in the EU? It’s highly illegal to gather data without consent here obviously. Even processing other data to derive location means processing data for purpose that’s different from one that was consented to (if they tried to get consent at all). There are big companies implicated here so it’d be easy to fine them into submission in jurisdictions that allow it.

[plenipotentprotogod@lemmy.world]

The sample data shared in the article includes

"c": "ES", // Country code,

ES is usually used for Spain, so it looks like these tests were run from within the EU.

[muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee]

I forgot I'm in a minority of people running a properly secure degoogled ROM.

[muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee]

Bunnings in Australia until very recently and u have basically 0 protections in the states.

[hendrik@palaver.p3x.de]

Same, same. But the occasional app refusing to work due to missing Play services and all the hoops I have to jump through, kind of remind me of that regularly.

[misk@sopuli.xyz]

Ah, there’s also this in json:

"uc": "1", // User consent for tracking = True; OK what ?!

My guess is that developers are pretending to got user consent to get more money from the ads.

[briantheebiscuiteer@lemmy.world]

I imagine an ad blocker could prevent this data going out, unless the hosts were generic and the game/app simply won't work without allowing those connections. I've never seen an app be [obviously] broken from my ad blocker but I am interested in running a similar experiment to see just how much data is going out.

[1fuji2taka3nasubi@lemmy.zip]

Wonder how the app sent geolocation with Location Services disabled.

[ulrich@feddit.org]

but it won't be very accurate

Which they actually acknowledge in the blog post.

Kind of interesting that they're smart enough to understand how to sniff packets but not enough to understand that IP address = location.

[ulrich@feddit.org]

So use a trustworthy middleman? Surely you can find someone more trustworthy than advertising companies?

[ulrich@feddit.org]

Not the magic bullet people think they are.

No one thinks VPNs are "magic bullets". I don't know why this gets repeated ad nauseum.

Oh, and you can't turn it off, so you'll have to take the loss in network speed on absolutely everything.

True but it's not that bad.

And better know how to configure each device so it doesn't go ahead and check leak your IP anyways

Just choose a good provider. You don't need to configure anything.

if any device on your network ever connects to the net without the VPN, then your anonymity just went out the window.

That's what kill switches are for.

[forrgott@lemm.ee]

I agree it's a powerful tool! I was specifically responding to "problem solved" in the previous comment. My reply was in no way meant as a general review of VPNs.

[mangopenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

True, it's storing the IP address that is the issue.

[mangopenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

Using firefox in strict mode with ublock origin, cookie auto-delete, and a VPN to change your IP should stop location tracking and cross-site tracking. Sites will still know you've visited them and what pages you've been to for that session but that is impossible to stop.

[breadstickninja@lemmy.world]

Storing it and associating it with all the other identifying information collected.

[priapus@sh.itjust.works]

Yeah, a middleman you get to choose. That's a huge improvement. There are plenty of trustworthy VPN providers.

[cyborganism@lemmy.ca]

Tor over VPN