Location data collected from mobile apps and digital advertising can reveal habits, interests and almost any other aspect of someone's life. In this report, we uncover how a geolocation surveillance system called Webloc uses ad-based data to monitor hundreds of millions of people across the globe.

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[–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

Do they have to follow GDPR delete or data requests?

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 6 months ago*

    Maybe the data brokers might delete based on the requests, but it seems this is a lot deeper than anything the GDPR could fix as the data would be reuploaded and updated, because the data comes from the "analytics" and "diagnostics" SDKs, being uploaded to data brokers and unified under the advertisement ID from google and apple devices/browsers.

    I think this could only be broken by not using the advertisement ID (that was promised to help anonimize the advertisement data) and block all the requests by DNS blocking on the whole device, like with Ublock Origin + Hosts file + pihole/nextdns/adguard, etc.

    Edit: also blocking cwsystem.com, cwtapp.com, cobwebsapp.com and subdomains, because they can host malware made from the company that owns this system.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Wow, the article is long. Long but good so far, I'm 20% in.

    Smartphones are just a clusterfuck in every last way. Maybe very technical people can avoid the worst of it. Most people can't.

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    [–] 5 points 7 months ago

    /rant Advertising broke the internet in so many ways since it became the number one way of monetizing “free” online services. Most popular means of communication (email, messaging, …), news distribution, or any other digital interaction (social media, neighborhood platforms, …) are driven by either selling users stuff they didn’t want from the service in the first place first place or by helping others do that through gathering huge amounts of data not needed for the service. So participation in the digital society partially forces us to play the game as non-profit open source solution typically only cover smaller portions of society. I’m so sick of it. /rantoff

    I was wondering if blocking ads and switching off location services would even limit the impact on Webloc much. It’s always surprising how much information ca be pulled from seemingly harmless interactions.

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