HN Explorer

Ask HN: What blackhat/ greyhat ad-tech were you surprised to learn about?

9 points by joewee ↗ HN
Coming from the security industry I was surprised to see the level of persistence ad networks implemented to track users across the web. What might technical folks be surprised to learn about the online marketing and ad-tech space?

4 comments

[ 31.4 ms ] story [ 1162 ms ] thread
onion2k
Phorm.

It was a while ago now so younger HN readers might not know about it, but Phorm was an ISP level deep packet inspection product that invaded users privacy on a massive scale, all just to market stuff to them. Thankfully it's now dead and gone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phorm

joewee
All the companies providing infrastructure support to ISPs should be suspect.
this2shallPass
That "US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data". Some know, but most probably do not. Most non-technical people would also be surprised by this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684

The top comment expands on the situation:

"It's not just your cell carrier. Your cell phone chip manufacturer, GPS chip manufacturer, phone manufacturer and then pretty much anyone on the installed OS (android crapware) is getting a copy of your location data. Usually not in software but by contract, one gives gps data to all the others as part of the bill of materials.

This is then usually (but not always) "anonymized" by cutting it in to ~5 second chunks. It's easy to put it back together again. We can figure out everything about your day from when you wake up to where you go to when you sleep.

This data is sold to whoever wants it. Hedge funds or services who analyze it for hedge funds is the big one. It's normal to track hundreds of millions of people a day and trade stocks based on where they go. This isn't fantasy, it's what happens every day.

Almost every web/smartphone mapping company is doing it, so is almost everyone that tracks you for some service - "turn the lights on when I get home". The web mapping companies and those that provide SDKs for "free". It's a monetization model for apps which don't need location. That's why Apple is trying hard to restrict it without scaring off consumers."