The second is incredibly common almost the default.

Most libraries will just collect as much info as they are able to, put it in JSON and ship it to some server. That includes your IP address.

It doesn’t really matter if it’s common. It’s not acceptable to do that.

It's no different to your IP address coming in the request headers.

Unless you’re behind a nat, home uses a 192. office uses 10. Favorite coffee shop uses 172. You're letting internal details leak and give another factor of correlation

‘collect as much info as they are able to, put it in JSON and ship it to some server.‘ is different from your IP address being known to that server.

Can you provide a source for this? I haven’t noticed this happening, although I believe the information is available in aggregate data. Of course, I also use uBlock etc so quite possible I simply haven’t noticed the trend.

Can confirm companies do this. I have helped build custom analytics solutions for android and iOS where apps dump literally anything and everything they can get data of. Product Managers are so inclined to scrape everything. I was surprised few years back when we could get device battery stats, nearby wifi ssids and even connected audio output device, if any.

Later moved on to other roles.

As an example of how simple it is to get this info, check out the readme on this really popular React Native component: https://github.com/react-native-community/react-native-devic...

I’m not implying it’s a creepy component. This component captures some really useful information, depending on your needs. But yeah, simple stuff.

And to back up an earlier comment in this thread, IP address is part of the user agent payload. That’s exceptionally common data to see, through browsers and apps. It doesn’t take a fancy library to capture that info.

I really wanted to be alarmed by this article, but I left with more questions than answers. And I’m guessing Amplitude is bummed by this press. They actually responded to say they don’t share data with 3rd parties, yet their name is peppered throughout the article, with implications that they are sneaky and nefarious.

They all say that, words are cheap.

On topic: your phone has many sensors and apps will use them. The only way to stop this is to literally disable the sensors. No more GPS, no more WiFi/Bluetooth scanning. Obviously this limits the functionality of your phone but it does work.