Your devices are tracking you all the time. You just don’t know it yet.
When you consent to sharing your data with many popular apps, you’re also allowing app developers to collect your data and sell it to third parties through trackers that supply advertisers with detailed information about where you live, work, and shop.
In November 2017, Yale Privacy Lab detected trackers in over 75% of the 300 Android apps it analyzed. A March 2018 study of 160,000 free Android apps found that more than 55% of trackers tried to extract user location, while 30% accessed the device’s contact list. And a 2015 analysis of 110 popular free mobile apps revealed that 47% of iOS apps shared geo-coordinates and other location data with third parties, and personally identifiable information, like names of users (provided by 18% of iOS apps), was also provided.
These are particularly nasty trackers, since it’s generally more difficult to block them.
Google could fix this pretty easily by allowing users to decide what they share. I remember a few years ago employees of google released an unofficial android build that gave users control over what data would be shared with apps, but google quickly stepped in and took it down because it actually allowed users to control google’s own data collection.
Google knows that the permission model in android hurts user privacy, but they keep it this way because they don’t want users to be able to decide what they can share/withhold (from google).
We could go back to the days of guys receiving tampon ads. Or getting ads about concerts in another city. Or AARP ads telling 20 year olds to sign up for retirement offerings. Was the old system any better? Or one I particularly hated — incessant ads about car insurance companies that don’t operate in my area.
I still don’t like all of the ads, but I sure don’t miss getting the irrelevant ads.
But we still get those. It’s called the mail. So now we have both supposedly relevant and irrelevant ads to deal with. So in other words, no change.
Personally, I simply block the online ads, pay for apps I care about, and dump all physical ads in the paper shredder. No amount of advertising to me is going to convince me that I need the shit you’re trying to shove down my throat. If I need something, or want something, then I will find it.
I totally agree with this. I need to try this too;
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-banish-junk-mail-from-your-real-world-…
Why do you waste additional energy shredding mail ads?
And some ads are good at letting you know about useful things you might not have heard about otherwise… or do you think you follow things so much so that no interesting smth passes you by?
I don’t even have enough budget for the stuff I discover without the help of ads.
Is that good enough for you?
See, since you block all, you apparently don’t know that not all “ads” even strictly try to only sell you something… For example, here on OSNews I often see one for WeLoveCycling.pl (by… Skoda auto), or of AI resources for devs from IBM and Intel, or educational resources by Thermo Fisher Scientific, or ~news about ~IT conferences, or Google resources/programmes for small EU businesses. And just today I got an ad for interesting-looking free to play Steam game, War Robots (w00t, battling robots! ;D )
Furthermore, some ads are about lessening the impact of buying stuff on home budget – I get relatively often ads for promotions on online shop I sometimes visit.
And just because you don’t have the budget for all the stuff you’d want now, doesn’t mean that Adsense can’t recommend to you things with which you’d be more happy than at least with some on your current wishlist – so it’d be a benefit.
Edited 2018-05-06 18:02 UTC
I should have been more clear. I consider “budget” to cover money, time, and stress.
I’m proactive about that, using services like IsThereAnyDeal.com, CamelCamelCamel, eBay Followed Searches, etc.
Anything more, and the costs in time and stress involved in putting up with the ads massively outstrip the potential benefits.
(Again, I’m an aspie with mild sensory overload issues.)
Well in my experience, being more proactive about deals wastes more time than just a simple ad from the shop you’re already interested in announcing some rebate… (IIRC, for example for recent Friday the 13th, ad with a black cat, everything cheaper 13%
/ fits with my view that Friday the 13th or black cats are lucky 
(unfortunatelly, my cat is mostly white, only with black tail and a patch on its head 
))
And the practice of blocking all ads might promote the making of advertorials …which are much worse / how’d you cope with them?
Edited 2018-05-10 21:07 UTC
You mean like informing you of products that solve problems you don’t really have in the first place? Do you honestly believe people need “help” figuring out what they need/want? Humans managed just fine for hundreds of thousands of years without being spammed by advertising – today is no different.
Ads are simply one of the channels we get info; they can be useful when done right, just one convenient way to decide what we need/want. And for most of that “hundreds of thousands of years” we lived in caves and the like (that also wasn’t “a problem to solve / we didn’t really have in the first place”), not in modern world…
You’re the first person I’ve ever heard describe advertising as a “convenient way to decide what we need/want”. Advertising is not convenient, it’s annoying – extremely annoying as proven by the vast popularity of ad-blockers. Nobody needs advertising to figure out what they need/want. It’s not rocket science and if anything advertising is a horrible tool to use as it’s sole purpose is to prompt an emotional response & purchase of goods or services. Ads have never and will never offer an unbiased recommendation or be in consideration of your best interest.
Not all advertising is “bad”, but that doesn’t justify the horrible behavior & tactics advertisers engage in, which at a minimum could be described as hostile and abusive. If advertising vanished from existence tomorrow, life would go on just fine and I’m confident you would manage to figure out what you want for lunch.
Edited 2018-05-07 00:21 UTC
jonsmirl in the post opening this thread was basically, at the very least, making a point that current ads are more convenient than the past ones…
Popularity of adblockers probably can’t be described as “vast” – otherwise Google wouldn’t be doing very good financially (and that people use their ads, also likely means that it’s at least somewhat convenient to them)
And decide, are ads a “horrible tool” or “not all advertising is “bad””… Also ads are better (at least they are honest to what they are) than advertorials (from which you might be getting recommendations…), which your practice of blocking all ads promotes…
BTW, North Korea has little ads from what I read once about it (not no ads though, IIRC there are some for example for locally produced Fiat Siena
), you might like it in there… ;P
Annoyingness of ads aside, if I see a targeted ad, it has no useful information to it aside from “Hey! This exists! Have we annoyed you enough to buy it!?”
Also, I simply find it too creepy to be followed around like that.
I actually maintain a blacklist/boycott list for any products which manage to slip through my ad-blocking.
This article does an excellent job of going into more detail on those points:
http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/
Personally, I’m quite happy with the loadout of open-source applications and GOG.com/Humble/etc. games I’ve managed to acquire.
As far as I’m concerned ALL advertising is irrelevant. I don’t care if the crap I get is for a local company or one in Tibet, it all winds up in the same place or gets the same reaction. If I get ads in the mail, they’re immediately discarded to my recycle bin. If I get ads in email, they’re immediately deleted. If you tape some ad to my garage door advertising your roofing business, it guarantees I will NEVER be your customer and I will NEVER recommend your company.
I despise all advertising although there was a time when I was willing to tolerate some amount of it. But ever since companies decided to flood/bombard/mega-spam the crap, I will tolerate none of it. I’m an adult who knows how to research services & products I’m interested in. *I* will find *you*. If you find me, G-F-YOURSELF.
FTA:
I may not have “known” it, but I have assumed this for years.
In the early years of Android and iOS, the smartphone market was exciting, with continual advances in both hardware and software. Then things eventually plateaued (as they always do), and became boring.
But these privacy abuses just make the whole thing depressing. I would rather pay $1 for a simple app than get a free app that tracks everything I do.
I am still hoping for a FOSS mobile OS (e.g., postmarketOS or Genode/Qt), but in the meantime, I just run very few apps and engage in the real world more. (Maybe that’s the silver lining.)
What I’d be more interested to know is: how many and which paid applications behave similarly?
Yup, that would be interesting to know the truth about.
Out of all the apps listed for iOS in this article, I only use Amazon and eBay. Neither of those apps connects to third parties (eBay connects to Paypal which makes sense as they are part of the same company) and neither app shares location data.
I don’t do social media anymore; no more Facebook, G+, Twitter, and I never got into Instagram or the various chat apps. I’m old and married so I don’t do Tinder either. I also don’t play many games on my smartphone; the few that I do play have sensible data privacy policies.
So, if you’re a boring wallflower like me and you use your phone for talking and work stuff, you’re fairly safe from tracking — apart from what your phone OS vendor does of course. Android users are by default tracked by Google, and we know they exist purely to profit off of their users’ advertising value.
You can’t buy or sell private data. You can’t even buy private data through a company merger, which is why google was forced not to merge google-plus and youtube data, and facebook forced to not merge facebook and whatsapp data.
Edited 2018-05-04 06:45 UTC