An amazing bit of digital detective work here. Seems like Linux mobile is your only off ramp from being exhaustively tracked
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 (which is personally identifiable information) means processing data for purpose that’s different to one that was consented to (if they tried to get any consent at all). There are big companies implicated here so it’d be easy to fine them into submission in jurisdictions that allow it.
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.
Ah, there’s also this piece in json:
"uc": "1", // User consent for tracking = True; OK what ?!My guess is that developers are pretending to get user consent to get more money from the ads. Unity could be encouraging this somehow but good luck proving that.
Easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Most companies are so big, getting caught is relatively cheap with how low the fines are compared to their annual profits.
It’s just a line item on their expense sheets, anymore, and most people don’t have the money to get the justice they deserve in court.
it’s been known for a long time that there is enough identifiable information in a “normal” person’s internet usage to identify exactly who and where you are and what you are likely doing just from metadata analysis and public domain information
question is, how is this being abused
All HTTP requests include your ip address, you don’t “consent” to giving it to anybody. You can geolocate somebody based on ip address but it won’t be very accurate
True, it’s storing the IP address that is the issue.
Storing it and associating it with all the other identifying information collected.
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.
Is there any straightforward way of stopping this besides dropping off the grid?
None worth pursuing
Using firefox in strict mode with ublock origin, cookie auto-delete, and a VPN to change your IP every now and then should stop location tracking and cross-site tracking. Sites will still know you’ve visited them and what pages you’ve been to in that session, but that is impossible to stop.
The main thing is don’t use apps, they can collect tons of data and tie it directly to your physical device, and run in the background while not actively using it.
Using a web browser is really the safest option I can think of because you have control over almost everything.
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.
Even with Linux it wouldn’t be that safe, if apps were doing this crap.
You’d want to be using only Linux apps that weren’t recording and reporting everything. Much easier to get in Linux than Apple/android
We just have to stop using the internet at this point
Wonder how the app sent geolocation with Location Services disabled.
