False. There is client-side protection in some browsers now, but this attack exploits native apps that submit precise geolocation when requesting location-targeted ads. It demonstrates how to essentially reverse engineer that precise location with a matrix of ads crafted for this purpose.
But I care some about it being tracked even when I'm not doing anything bad.
Reverse engineering will get you a PoC, but you can buy the cleansed data fairly easily (apparently..)
It's great that some OSes are trying to solve it system-wide but host blocking isn't viable as ubiquitous protection against this attack. It would just break all ads all the time, which ultimately would make the platform untenable for ad-based apps. What you want is something like the machine-learning Intelligent Tracking Prevention that Safari just rolled out, but applied to native apps. That is non-trivial.
Sounds like a feature not a bug.
Anyways I'm sure tech savvy folks who care about privacy and hate ads already have all the basic angles covered. I know I do!
fixed it for you.
I discovered Google Play's App Store on someone else's phone, that was painful and stressful. But what you are describing seems hellish.
I wanted to get a PCAP from an app a few nights ago, I was surprised it was possible without root. Now there are apps that can act as a VPN to sniff traffic. Having the most up to date firmware and Google Fi's international rates are worth giving up root to me.
It would be nice if they built in secure root access interface to Android though.
If you rein in the notifications (ie. switch them all off), use Firefox with uBlock Origin (or Firefox Focus) and avoid using apps with obnoxious ads (or switch to the paid versions), Android as of 2017 is quite nice.
On behalf of the Linux community, no need to thank us, you're welcome.
I wonder if it's feasible to construct an ISP that still must know where all it's customers are, but can't distinguish between them.
The only reason those tech companies are against ISP tracking is that it hurts their revenue model...significantly.
Don’t by in to the easy explanation - look at their motivations.
Not really, though, at least for ios. On android there are at least firefox + extensions, but there's nothing quite capable/available on ios at the moment.
Now the issue is your ISP getting into the marketing/data-monger business, since they have the keys to your privacy kingdom and are becoming increasingly desperate for profits.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrew...