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For Under $1,000, Mobile Ads Can Track Your Location (mashable.com)
"Researchers were able to use GPS data from an ad network to track a user to their actual location, and trace movements through town," writes phantomfive. Mashable reports:
The idea is straightforward: Associate a series of ads with a specific individual as well as predetermined GPS coordinates. When those ads are served to a smartphone app, you know where that individual has been... It's a surprisingly simple technique, and the researchers say you can pull it off for "$1,000 or less." The relatively low cost means that digitally tracking a target in this manner isn't just for corporations, governments, or criminal enterprises. Rather, the stalker next door can have a go at it as well... Refusing to click on the popups isn't enough, as the person being surveilled doesn't need to do so for this to work -- simply being served the advertisements is all it takes.
It's "an industry-wide issue," according to the researchers, while Mashable labels it "digital surveillance, made available to any and all with money on hand, brought to the masses by your friendly neighborhood Silicon Valley disrupters."
It's "an industry-wide issue," according to the researchers, while Mashable labels it "digital surveillance, made available to any and all with money on hand, brought to the masses by your friendly neighborhood Silicon Valley disrupters."
...why adblocking is so popular?
Tracking in general is certainly the reason for me. Binning the actual ads is incidental except for the whole personalised aspect of ads. This is the tracking part in action of course.
What's wrong with simply making the ads subject related rather than that who is looking? What the user is looked for/at at that moment should be more than enough to make a targeted ad without it being personalised.
I imagine the more reputable (i.e. common) ad networks will/already prohibit such specific targeting.
No. I've worked in ad-tech, and I can tell you the answer is no. There is absolutely no motivation for ad companies to even think about this problem beyond a token effort.
Ad companies have every motivation, indeed they have people paying them to give them as much information about a person as possible. This isn't even a new thing: decades ago you could buy mailing lists with names, addresses, gender, and income.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."