> Sounds like the bigger issue is that you're able to get "spatiotemporal" data in the first place?
Yeah, this just sounds like it's written from the perspective of a data broker.
Tying particular ad analytics (presumably ip geolocation?) to thousands of particular individuals and having it well populated enough to track them is "privileged first-party data access" by another name.
Your location is leaked in many, many ways. Even if you have location services off on your phone, the first-party (Google, Apple) has access to your precise location. On Android, this bypasses VPNs, and I believe on iOS/Mac first-party apps also bypass VPNs. You are trusting that this data is not leaked to any third-parties. You cannot verify this, as the data is exfiltrated to servers which you can't verify.
Okay, fine, I'll just install another operating system then, like KDE plasma mobile or GrapheneOS. Your location is still leaked 24/7. This is because your cellular modem has it's own operating system, running underneath your phone's operating system, which is triangulating your location at all times. Once again, you are trusting that telecommunications companies aren't misusing this - but please remember they're complied, by law, to make a lot of this information available to numerous third parties.
Okay fine, let me just remove the Sim then and use my phone on Wifi only, always through a VPN. Your location is still being leaked potentially, for example, by your car. Your car also has a cellular modem which leaks your location, and you probably signed a contract allowing that data to be given to hundreds of third-parties.
Of course, all of this is assuming you don't use any social media. Social media can also leak your location, even without location services. If you review a restaurant - that's your location. Where are your friends? You're probably around them. And on and on.
> Your location is still being leaked potentially, for example, by your car. Your car also has a cellular modem which leaks your location, and you probably signed a contract allowing that data to be given to hundreds of third-parties.
Ok, fine. I'll just drive classic cars for the rest of my life. Your location is still being leaked by a global network of automated license plate reading cameras https://deflock.me/
We literally need to train kids in Spy vs Spy tier information security if we want them to have a chance at being adults capable of avoiding this grid in any appreciable way.
>On Android, this bypasses VPNs
source?
>You are trusting that this data is not leaked to any third-parties. You cannot verify this, as the data is exfiltrated to servers which you can't verify.
At least on Android you can theoretically disable "google location accuracy" which stops it sending nearby hotspot mac addresses to Google. That's the only public route where google gets your location without you knowingly sending to it. You also imply that mobile operating systems are surreptitiously sending locations back to google/apple even if users have all location related features disabled, but I'm not aware of any evidence this is the case, and this falls into same category as "facebook is secretly listening to you" territory until proven otherwise.
I mean you're saying a lot for rhetorical effect, but it doesn't get around the fact that there aren't that many avenues to reliably collect this data, with high enough resolution and tied to identity, for thousands/millions of individuals, and if you do have that data, you're basically a data broker. I mean, yes, all those things are true, and they're pooled together and available for sale by data brokers.
It's also disappointing that the root comment is distracting from the 4th amendment violations by making the conversation about their vague claims of selling mini-palantir demos through abusing web ads.
The assumption that the data must be "high resolution" is erroneous. Low resolution noisy data works just fine, you just need a lot more of it. You can use standard signal processing tricks such as stacking noisy low-resolution data to extract high-resolution features. This requires a lot more processing but that isn't much of a limitation. These reconstruction techniques work even if the data is from unrelated sources that aren't even trying to measure the thing you are measuring.
Any data exhaust will work, people have created interesting PoCs leveraging things like HVAC data, RF attenuation, etc. High-precision weather models essentially work the same way, making inferences by stitching together diverse event data that has nothing to do with weather.
High-quality high-resolution data sources largely don't exist in the way people imagine they do, so you need to do this anyway. If you have a high-resolution spatiotemporal graph for entities, tying it to identity is always trivial.
It would be more common if it weren't for the fact that open source platforms scale poorly for this type of analytical processing.
Anyone could have acquired this data the time, it was all either free or cheap. Like I said, my business was specialized data infrastructure (e.g. storage engines and analytical parallel processing), we just used these data sources for testing and demos because "free or cheap".
I also have a lot of experience with privileged first-party data but that is governed by a different set of rules and is often regulated. You have to be much more circumspect about how you use it.
Even though it might be convenient to e.g. slurp telemetry off a mobile carrier's backbone, what you eventually realize is the inability to do this isn't a real limitation and in some ways is a blessing in disguise.