this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
214 points (97.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35822 readers
997 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm trying to understand how an app would even get that info in the first place, how that's classified and why a mobile operating system even has a way to provide that data.

Am I correct in assuming that if an app is used without play store / play store framework that it would not be able to get access to that data?

Thanks!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cinabongo@lemmy.world 155 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

From what I know having worked in adtech,

  • they collect as much information as they can from the device such as location from GPS, interests from follows, likes dwell time on posts, and other information you knowingly or unknowingly provide. This includes scraping information from photos and videos you upload to the app. Eg, you upload a picture of an expensive bag with the caption "my new bag" - the bag brand can be determined and assessed algorithmically.
  • the above extends to websites you visit with in-app browsers and the actions you take while on those pages
  • deduce what they can't eg where you live & work based where you spend time during the day vs night,your real life interests based on places you visit eg gym, fast food places, church etc. Also they apply complex algorithms to relatively accurately deduce anything you don't directly provide. Eg if you disable accurate location, they can figure it out based on the ip address(es) you connect to the app from (geolocation algorithms) .
  • and what they can't deduce is bought from third parties. Those are companies normal people don't know exist whose sole purpose is scraping and categorising information - sort of similar to credit agencies but different. In this case, they take what they know about you and send it to this third party which then returns eveything they have that's related. Eg the app (threads) might send your email and username and get a response containing your previous home address (say scraped from some insecure government website)

With the above, even without knowing your name (this can easily be determined) , they are able to know enough about you to determine the kind of person you are, with whom you interact, where you go, your political affiliations, job, salary estimate etc and sell it to advertisers. This is usually sold as "audiences" but given the tools provided to advertisers, it's easy to create hyper targeted ads and recommendations (remember Cambridge Analytica).

We voluntarily give up a lot more information than we realise.

And remember, the smartest people on the planet work at these companies, so the above is nothing in comparison to what behemoths like Facebook, Google, Tencent, etc are capable of.

[–] zlatiah@kbin.social 25 points 1 year ago

Second this!

Phones give out a lot of personal information on their own lol. On top of the phone, don't forget that social media apps like Threads also require you to login... with credentials stored at FB/Meta... that they can derive all the aforementioned information on, as well as other type of things (Amazon purchases? Stuff you watch on youtube.com? Google queries?...) by using some creative tracking technology. You basically gave them a dog tag to identify you whenever you sign up for services after all

For shittier apps like Thread, apparently they also do some weird stuff like forcing the app to be on once the OS boots, so... yeah.

[–] MaxVoltage@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

Imagine doing all that work and still lose money

[–] bricks@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is a really good oversight (see: insight, overview, etc). Honestly, for anyone actually interested in this stuff and what makes the internet tracking/advertising machine tick, take some of the HubSpot Academy’s courses. There’s definitely other courses out there, but the HubSpot ones are all free, and the topics aren’t hard once you get immersed in it.

Plus afterwards you can put the faux-certs on your resume and knife fight with the 20,000,000 other adtech people that just got laid off.

[–] ndr@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not a native speaker and kind of OT, but isn’t it supposed to be “overview” rather than “oversight” in this case? Maybe not necessarily “overview”, but I think “oversight” would only mean mistake or supervision. I was just wondering.

[–] bricks@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Probably. I write half my comments drunk, so I wouldn’t use them as a basis for ESL learning 🙃

It’s a good catch!! Apologies for any confusion.

[–] Kribensis@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Insight. They mean insight.

[–] desmondjones@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Don’t forget, giving these apps access to your photos also opens up a puzzle of location data of where you spend your time and have visited

[–] Niello@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Doesn't Threads app have direct access to browsing history as well? I feel like that's another can of worm that could probably use some further explanation on.

[–] I_Miss_Daniel@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

This sort of makes it tempting to run everything in an emulated virtual machine that is streamed to your phone...

Each app in a separate instance...