Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to introduce persistent user tracking

Re:Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to introduce persistent use... by tsimionescu on Saturday July 23, 2022 @06:41PM (#32208279)

That's only about how Verizon did it back in the day. They don't explain how Vodafone and DT are planning to technically achieve it, but it could simply be related to IP or similar lower level protocol addresses from 4/5G. As network operators, they have access to the Account:IP mapping, they don't necessarily need to inject anything special in the packets.

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Re:Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to introduce persistent use... by tomxor on Saturday July 23, 2022 @07:14PM (#32208526)

Yup, there is no way to hide basic packet information from your ISP without some kind of tunnelling like Wiregaurd or TOR.

I already stopped trusting my ISP after it was announced that one of the three UK LTE internet providers had implemented the "log absolutely everything" clause in the snoopers charter... I guess now the cats out of the bag, Vodafone is likely the provider, since they can probably build upon what they have already implemented and sell it to 3rd parties. Pretty gross.

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Re:Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to introduce persistent use... by mpeg on Sunday July 24, 2022 @05:48AM (#32211824)

That wouldn’t work as they almost certainly use CGNAT so an IP address is shared with thousands of subscribers.

If I had to guess, they probably have a process similar to a cookie sync to obtain this id.

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Re:Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to introduce persistent use... by tsimionescu on Sunday July 24, 2022 @07:53AM (#32212550)

They're the carrier: they know exactly at every time what IP:port belongs to each phone, otherwise they couldn't send the response packets back to the phone.

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Re:Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to introduce persistent use... by mpeg on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @12:19PM (#32252426)

But they have to communicate this to the advertisers in the RTB bidstream, in a way that advertisers can decode to a unique subscriber identifier (or at least unique enough)

Sending just the IP would be useless, as the publisher already has the IP address (and sends it to bidstream, although it is truncated for privacy) so there would be little incentive to pay for the carrier data.

I worked in adtech for a while, and designed a system similar to this for a large UK carrier, although it never ended up being implemented as carrier was worried about optics.

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