everyone knows your location: in-app ads

From the «your house = sucks» department:
Title: Everyone Knows Your Location: Tracking Myself Down Through in-App Ads
Author: admin@soylentnews.org
Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2025 16:43:00 +0000
Link: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=25/02/04/1455221&from=rss

hubie[1] writes:

Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads[2]:

Recently I read about a massive geolocation data leak from Gravy Analytics[3]
, which exposed more than 2000 apps, both in AppStore and Google Play, that
secretly collect geolocation data without user consent. Oftentimes, even
without developers` knowledge.

I looked into the list (link here[4]) and found at least 3 apps I have
installed on my iPhone. Take a look for yourself!
This made me come up with an idea to track myself down externally, e.g. to
buy my geolocation data leaked by some application.

TL;DR

After more than couple dozen hours of trying, here are the main takeaways:

1.I found a couple requests sent by my phone with my location + 5 requests
that leak my IP address, which can be turned into geolocation using
reverse DNS.
2.Learned a lot about the RTB (real-time bidding) auctions and OpenRTB
protocol and was shocked by the amount and types of data sent with the
bids to ad exchanges.
3.Gave up on the idea to buy my location data from a data broker or a
tracking service, because I don't have a big enough company to take a
trial or $10-50k to buy a huge database with the data of millions of
people + me.
Well maybe I do, but such expense seems a bit irrational.
Turns out that EU-based peoples` data is almost the most expensive.

But still, I know my location data was collected and I know where to buy it!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Original Submission[5]

Read more of this story[6] at SoylentNews.

Links:
[1]: https://soylentnews.org/~hubie/ (link)
[2]: https://timsh.org/tracking-myself-down-through-in-app-ads/ (link)
[3]: https://www.404media.co/hackers-claim-massive-breach-of-location-data-giant-threaten-to-leak-data/?ref=timsh.org (link)
[4]: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ukgd0gIWd9gpV6bOx2pcSHsVO6yIUqbjnlM4ewjO6Cs/edit?gid=1257088277ref=timsh.org#gid=1257088277 (link)
[5]: https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsubsubid=64924 (link)
[6]: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=25/02/04/1455221&from=rss (link)