Specifically, these big companies revenue share with app companies who in turn increase monetization via selling your private information, esp via free apps. In exchange for Apple etc super high app store rake percentage fees, they claim to run security vetting programs and ToS that vet who they do business with and tell users & courts that things are safe, even when they know they're not.
It's not rocket science for phone OS's to figure out who these companies are and, as iOS / android os users already get tracked by apple/google/etc, triangulate to which apps are participating
> consumer apps embed ad SDKs → those SDKs feed location signals into RTB ad exchanges → surveillance-oriented firms sit in the RTB pipeline and harvest bid request data even without winning auctions
Would you ban ad supported apps? Assuming the comment you're responding to is realistic, I'm not sure how the OS is to blame.
Maybe one clear example is needing a permission once for setup and then it remaining persistent.
An easy demonstration is just looking at what Graphene has done. It's open source and you wana say Google can't protect their users better? Certainly Graphene has some advanced features but not everything can be dismissed so easily. Besides, just throw advanced features behind a hidden menu (which they already have!). There's no reason you can't many most users happy while also catering to power users (they'll always complain, but that's their job)
There's no need to ban ad supported apps when you can just ban the practice of using ads targeting users based on individual characteristics.
However, I'd be shocked if a cursory audit comparing SDKs embedded in apps and disclosed data sales showed they were effectively enforcing anything at all.
If Google & Apple & friends refused to take a rake and opened distribution, then I'd agree, net neutrality etc, not their problem
But they own so much, and so deep into the pipeline, and explain their fees to courts because "security"... and then don't do investigations. They employ some of the best security analysts in the world and have $10-30B/yr revenue tied to just the app store fees, so they very much can take a big bite out of this if they wanted.
> They employ some of the best security analysts in the world and have $10-30B/yr revenue
I'm completely with you, they could do these things if they wanted to. They have the money. They have the manpower. It is just a matter of priority. And we need to be honest, they're spending larger amounts on slop than actual fixes or even making their products better (for the user).
Yes, I absolutely would. Advertisements are a scourge upon people's wellbeing on top of being ugly and intrusive.
If you want to build a free product, that's great. Build a free product.
If you want to make money from your product, then charge for your product.
And then you will get fired by the end of day.
Really these days it's 95% psychological manipulation to get people to buy inferior quality stuff they don't need. And 5% of people actually finding what they're looking for.
Don't forget, most advertising can work fine in a "pull" mode. I need something so I go out and look for it. These days something like Google (not ideal because results also manipulated by the highest bidder). Or I look for dedicated forums or a subreddit for real people's experiences. In the old days it would have been yellow pages or ask a friend.
Just as importantly, apps aren't allowed to remove functionality if the user says no.
You need additional permissions to do things like access location data or scan local networks for device fingerprinting.
[1] https://quickthoughts.ca/autotracko/ [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/targeted-advertising-g...
Also, unlike facebook, they also weren't just caught running a dark money lobbyist network with the goal of forcing more collection of minors' private information.
Or for location, the cellular providers?
The interesting part is Google & Apple, as part of explaining to courts why their large app store fees are legit and not proof of monopoly positions, hid behind the security argument that they need to be the clearing house of what software runs on the devices. Except... they've knowingly punted on this one for 10+ years.
I would 100% agree that losing privacy through any utility-level carrier (credit cards, phone, OS provider, etc) should be default disallowed, and any opt-ins have a clear transparency mode with easy opt-out. At least two areas the US can learn from the EU on digital policy is digital marketplaces and consumer privacy protection, and this topic is at the intersection of both.
Fine, we'll force companies to allow a small little box to be added to their data center. Don't worry about what it does, but you cannot disconnect network/power to it once it is installed. Once it is operational, you'll no longer need to think about it ever again, and we recommend that you don't. You should also not talk about this box to users/customers/clients. In fact, you'd be better off if you didn't talk to your employees about it either.
Especially after Snowden, if anyone does not think the US govt TLAs are trying to read every bit that crosses a wire, then they are just deluding themselves. Even before Snowden, Echelon was known for telephonic intercepts. It didn't take much imagination to take it further for internet traffic. Snowden just removed the need for imagination.
Most people I've spoken with are either thinking "Apple/Google/Government would never allow apps to do something like that!" or they think "Everyone is already doing it so why bother trying to fight it. I'd only be inconveniencing myself for nothing"
That's the thing they don't just sit around, they all have run at start up and for Android I blame Google for not giving users the ability to block run at start up.
General Motors sold driving data to data brokers including LexisNexus. Anyone, private or government can buy data from LexisNexus.
That stupid game you installed a year ago, that's what gets you.
If you have a smartphone keep a very sharp eye on your location services, and whether they're in the state you expect them to be in. Also a great way to save your battery.
As if I had a choice.
As if politicians of any party care now, in a meaningful way.
As if news orgs were ever interested in security experts who sounded the klaxons (for years and years and years).
Everyone who has it is selling that info, and nearly everyone who collects it is selling it. Until there are laws that actually protect us, we should stop giving companies our location data every chance we get and push for laws that prevent it from being unnecessarily collected in the first place.
I don't see how we overcome that massive hurdle. It's not like those who ostensibly make the laws don't know and approve, and probably intentionally implemented that.
We now have full scale mass tracking and surveillance of the kind no one pre-9/11 would believe would have been allowed to exist in the form of the Flock cameras (of course it was an enemy Brit implementing surveillance in the USA) making anonymity quite literally as challenging as Winston Smith trying to move around without being detected to meet his love interest.
How are we going to get the de facto tyrants in the government to pass laws that materially disempower them by being unable to mass surveil everyone at any given time if they don't like what you are saying or thinking?
The problem with all the naysayers for all those decades is that once you have given up control over your own life and you have given away your rights protected by the Constitution, your enemies in the government are unlikely to simply give them back because you ask nicely. In fact, they will most likely aggressively move against anyone that even suggests that you nicely ask for your rights back.
Even the "reasonable person" standard for court would probably conclude that most people would never read it.
I'd be perfectly fine with going after companies that sell data to the government, but I don't think it would be fair to go after companies who were forced to hand data over unwillingly, even if they didn't inform the public it was going on out of fear of reproductions.
For example you can have a truthful statement: “all of the apps that you have are constantly spying on you”
And the rejoinder is “ any given app is not specifically selling my data to specifically the FBI and so therefore it is not spying”
To which the response would be: “that is correct however the aggregate data is bundled and sold off to specifically the FBI or intelligence agencies and so there cannot be a logical differentiation between apps.”
By that point the person has downloaded another rewards app and added their drivers license to it.
And consent needs to be granted explicitly for each party that might get access to my location, you can't just get blanket consent to sell my location to anyone, especially not with real-time identifiable location data.
Don't deliberately write a loophole. No need for this part.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf
This is very different from buying your data from a company especially when the user consented to their location being tracked.
Too many people in these threads jumping to anti-Trump when the real issue is how quick we are to give up our our privacy to use technology and then quickly turn to shock in anger when it’s used against us.
No, it's not 'very different'. When you sign a cellular contract you consent to all sorts of tracking and data collection, but it still requires a warrant for government to obtain.
If you consented, no warrant would be required.
I would love for investigative groups to target the auto industry’s data collection practices and have meaningful legislation created and implemented as a result.
Both things are very real problems.
If the SCOTUS case merely said "needs a warrant to access historical data"... it didn't say "only if acquired via specific means" (like a subpoena), right?
[1] https://ij.org/press-release/fbi-caught-trying-to-sweep-its-...
edit: downvoters, is this not true? this is a historic problem with the agencies. This doesn't mean it's not also a problem with this administration. Two things can be true at once. I like pancakes and waffles.
Every administration needs to deal with the conflict of protection versus privacy. They all do things that privacy advocates wish they didn't.
But not since the early 70s has one been so explicit that it wants to use the justice system to punish their enemies, without even the pretense of a criminal charge.
So I think you're being downvoted over the perception of both-sidesism.
> I hate how weaponized each side is.
To be clear, one of these things has happened. The other has been hyped on Fox News.
It is really a stretch to "Both Sides" this issue.
Did this take place? Or is it just a fear of a hypothetical?
I don't give the actions of one group the same weight as the opinions of some people in the other group.
But the truth is, Democrats can win every single election this year and in 2028 and they would not be allowed to govern by this Supreme Court, which has chosen over and over again to overturn precedent and sow chaos.
Unfortunately, to arrest the slide into right-wing authoritarianism, you have to adopt their tactics sometimes.
But you don’t have anything to worry about. The democrats aren’t going to do any of this, and we’ll be in an even worse state in 2032.
> The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.
There is a huge gulf between ignoring standing law or a supreme court ruling and ignoring precedent. One involves choosing not to acknowledge i.e. disobeying, an authority, and the other involves choosing to act differently than has generally been expected in the past. Moreover, at least in recent history, it's primarily the Republicans who began the practice of ignoring precedent, long before our slow descent into where we are now: blatantly flaunting the law. See Merrick Garland's ignored nomination or the house's recent ludicrous delay of swearing in an elected representative for just two easy examples of this.
I mean none of this in any partisan fashion. It's simply a matter of fact. The idea that the GOP and the Democratic parties somehow engage in the same level or kind of antics and are thus deserving of the same level of nihilistic apathy as some kind of moderate position is charitably tragically misinformed.
https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-steht-vo...
Sure, you can get a burner, but you have to make sure you never use it anywhere near anyone you know, that the sim is obtained anonymously, that you're never imaged by any of the ubiquitous cameras, etc. Merely having it powered on provides enough metadata to establish a shadow profile, and it's nearly impossible for a person to secure two separate identities. There's also the superman problem - the burner phone would only ever appear when anonymars is missing, and vice versa, creating a real and exploitable pattern if anyone like the FBI wanted to root around in your life. All they'd have to do is query which shadow profiles match the temporal gaps correlated with your disappearance from tracking.
There's really no escaping it. The only fix is legislation - outright banning mass surveillance, with lethal corporate penalties and long prison terms for C-Suite responsible for violations. Short of that, we live in a world that is implicitly compromised and insecure unless you have nation state level resources.
This is nonsense. By your logic, people go 'missing' any time they are not using a computer, whether they're reading a book, in the shower, or asleep in bed.
And by doing this they stop a terror attack?
One more thought - if they buy just data for specific people related to an investigation, the seller of the data is tipped off. If they just buy all the data, then there is no potential tip-off to the target.
Then again, what I _really_ want is for the FBI to prevent crime. If their only solution is to let crime happen and then use a giant dragnet to put people in jail then they are less than worthless... they are actively dangerous to democracy.
And by doing this they stop a terror attack?
Fuck off. This is just trying to manipulate people with fear of undefined bad thing.
Because it makes them money and that's literally the only thing they care about. They'd do anything for money and the only reason they ever don't do something is because it either wouldn't make them money at all, or it would cost them more money than they'd make.
The FBI is violating the spirit and original intent of the 4A by creating an entire industry out of the “3rd party doctrine” bypass to the 4A. That doctrine was whole cloth created by SCOTUS and Congress has been too happy to avoid credit or blame for it to not enshrine it in statute.
No:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
Many retail sites have a "find a nearby" store function. They often outsource this to a third party...for something as silly as geolocation and geographical lookups. This third party is the one that offers its services for a discount but also siphons up your location data to sell.
"This article explains what these 13 potential effects of punishment are and how they have been theorized. It further reviews the body of available empirical evidence for each of these mechanisms."
That kind of pattern can be used to determine that two or more different app-identities are the same person, and anybody buying that data has a strong incentive to try it.
Have Instagram installed on your phone? Great, now every Meta-owned app _or advertiser running on their platform_ has a pretty good shot at identifying you based on IP, location, app usage, etc.
There is a ton of signal about identity available just by virtue of running alongside other apps. Screen size, OS version, and IP are pretty good proxies for unique identity, especially if all you care about is _probable_ matches.
> Wyden said buying information on Americans without obtaining a warrant was an “outrageous end-run around the Fourth Amendment,”
America needs privacy laws for this reason (or an amendment, but good luck). Vote when November rolls around; the other piece is finding Democrats that will take an actual stance on privacy closer to Wyden's.
The government is supposed to follow the law, be accountable, transparent, and must operate within a constrained, circumscribed zone of activity which is debated and discussed. That's at least how it's supposed to work.
Private companies are understood as amoral sharks who have no obligation to do anything other than operate in their narrowest self-interest, and the law is used as a club to beat them back from what they so clearly want to do, and will do if at all possible. They are unaccountable to anything other than the legal system and their share price. Suggesting that they might have any further obligation is tantamount to questioning whether capitalism should exist. It happens all the time on HN.
So of course the FBI would like to keep their hands mostly clean by having one of those accepted-to-be-horrible companies gather this data and then buy the resulting trove.
If you're lucky, it's pseudo-anonymous. Of course it's actually not - aggregated location data is inherently not anonymous.
Yet they can't write a law to make this basic practice illegal.
Why do I feel like I'm not being represented _at all_?
Unless you're saying Apple is selling the location information they may have directly?
They could also better enable network traffic inspection on device, so we could tell where data is going. LittleSnitch on iOS would be great.
And then it turns out the video took place in Dallas.
We like to think there are all these barriers to bad things happening where we live. "I'm sure someone (not me) would stop that." But it turns out there isn't as much bulwark as we think. Or we're the bulwark, so if it isn't us, then there is nobody else.
I think in years past people would have objected to sale of personal location data. But that was before people had videos of groups of lawbreakers overwhelming laws through organized efforts.
You're saying organized crime is new? Or videos of it?
https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-...
Might be cheaper than round the clock SWAT teams https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/us/politics/kash-patel-gi...
Also, isn't this breaking the constitution? It bypasses needing a warrant respectively having a objective suspicion.
I don't think that's been of much concern as of late.
Nope.
Your personal information, when given to others, is now trash on the curb (in a literal sense, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_v._Greenwood )
Buying it just clears up the chain of custody as opposed to the NSA stealing it and reverse engineering your warrant -- OR -- using the good ole stingray.