limecool

joined 4 years ago
 

Some of the world’s most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement.

The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush and dating apps like Tinder to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystem—not code developed by the app creators themselves—this data collection is likely happening without users’ or even app developers’ knowledge.

“For the first time publicly, we seem to have proof that one of the largest data brokers selling to both commercial and government clients appears to be acquiring their data from the online advertising ‘bid stream,’” rather than code embedded into the apps themselves, Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push and who has followed the location data industry closely, tells 404 Media after reviewing some of the data.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It's there on mobile. Check the details tab in tracking protection. You should see it mentioned there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Is there a non paywalled article somewhere? It asks for a sub the alternative asks for sign up and free trial.

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

I don't see any posts on ! [email protected] when browsing from this account on Sync. But, if I visit it from apps like voyager, boost they load fine.

Edit: I noticed I cannot find this post via search in this community. It's like this post doesn't exist at all.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Firefox could get litigated for ad fraud and these trusted 3rd parties could block firefox from accessing the sites. It won't work.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

That may be true on desktop. But, unfortunately, the mobile app is way behind chromium. From being unresponsive, to outright buggy. It's not a good experince. It's been 2 years since the rewrite but it's not getting much better or even close to fixing most of its issue. Meaning, using firefox on android is a handicap on yourself.