I work with Ad Data a lot in my job, and there's a lot of misconceptions about what this data that journalists love to propogate:

The location data in these networks is very inaccurate. Your OS and browser actually do a pretty good job of locking down your location data unless you give explicit permission. It's in the ad network's interests to lie about the quality of their data - so a lot of the "location" data is going to be a vaguely accurate guess based on your IP address.

But also, location data is really important to ads right now because, contrary to common perception, per user tracking is very, very hard. Each SDK might be tattling on you, but unless you give them a key to match you across apps, each signal from each app is unique. Which is why you are often served advertisements based on what other people on your network is searching - it's much easier to just blast everyone at that IP address than it is to find that specific user or device again in the data stream.

Bidstream data in particular is very fraught. You're only getting the active data at the point the add is served, but it's not easy to aggregate in any way. You'll be counting the same person separately dozens or hundreds of times with different identifiers for each. The data you get from something like Mobilewalla is not useful for tracking individuals so much as it's useful for finding patterns.

I think it's pretty telling from the few examples shared about how agencies actually use the data:

>"CBP uses the information to “look for cellphone activity in unusual places,” including unpopulated portions of the US-Mexico border."

>According to the Wall Street Journal, the IRS tried to use Venntel’s data to track individual suspects, but gave up when it couldn’t locate its targets in the company’s dataset.

>In March 2021, SOCOM told Vice that the purpose of the contract was to “evaluate” the feasibility of using A6 services in an “overseas operating environment,” and that the government was no longer executing the contract

Something is going to have to be figured out about this data - realistically the only way is a sunset on customized advertisements. However, I would personally not be worried (yet) that the government is going to be able to identify an individual and track them down using these public sources as they currently are.

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ducttape12 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Neither the government nor an ad agency needs to know where I am, no matter how "rough" the data is. It's none of their business.

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legitster 3 hours ago | parent [-]

At this point, your device is not giving anyone your location without explicit permission. So it really just comes down to your IP Address, which services do need.

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golem14 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think your is statement is inaccurate to the point of being intentionally misleading:

Many devices, when running, and in some cases even if turned off but connected to their battery, will ping cell towers (maybe even BLE/Wifi) and get triangulated by the network infrastructure (such as cell towers) without actively broadcasting the GPS location.

That's why I don't quite understand why the gubernment needs to have finer grained data (esp around the US/Mexican border). Precision location info would only be needed if you need to track people in densely populated areas.

	▲	jonas21 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That location information is not available to apps or ad networks. The government can get access to that data from the carrier with a warrant, but that's not what we're discussing here.

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notnullorvoid 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IP Address is all you need to get fairly accurate (town or neighborhood) location for most of North America.

But it is necessary to send it somewhere, otherwise the internet wouldn't work.

Unfortunately it seems to have become accepted for our devices to communicate constantly and often with services we never explicitly started communication with (like Ad networks used in Apps).

Permission systems on devices should care about Network connections just as much as Location. Ideally when installing an app you'd get the list of domains it requests to communicate with, and you could toggle them. Bonus points if the app store made it a requirement to identify which Domains are third parties and the category like an Ad service.

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tencentshill an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Then you are obligated to obscure that with a trusted no-log VPN too.