Entries Tagged "tracking"

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The Advertising Value of Intrusive Tracking

Here’s an interesting research paper that tries to calculate the differential value of privacy-invasive advertising practices.

The researchers used data from a mobile ad network and was able to see how different personalized advertising practices affected customer purchasing behavior. The details are interesting, but basically, most personal information had little value. Overall, the ability to target advertising produces a 29% greater return on an advertising budget, mostly by knowing the right time to show someone a particular ad.

The paper was presented at WEIS 2015.

Posted on August 24, 2015 at 5:50 AM • View Comments

Now Corporate Drones are Spying on Cell Phones

The marketing firm Adnear is using drones to track cell phone users:

The capture does not involve conversations or personally identifiable information, according to director of marketing and research Smriti Kataria. It uses signal strength, cell tower triangulation, and other indicators to determine where the device is, and that information is then used to map the user’s travel patterns.

“Let’s say someone is walking near a coffee shop,” Kataria said by way of example.

The coffee shop may want to offer in-app ads or discount coupons to people who often walk by but don’t enter, as well as to frequent patrons when they are elsewhere. Adnear’s client would be the coffee shop or other retailers who want to entice passersby.

[…]

The system identifies a given user through the device ID, and the location info is used to flesh out the user’s physical traffic pattern in his profile. Although anonymous, the user is “identified” as a code. The company says that no name, phone number, router ID, or other personally identifiable information is captured, and there is no photography or video.

Does anyone except this company believe that device ID is not personally identifiable information?

Posted on March 5, 2015 at 6:33 AM • View Comments

Cell Phones Leak Location Information through Power Usage

New research on tracking the location of smart phone users by monitoring power consumption:

PowerSpy takes advantage of the fact that a phone’s cellular transmissions use more power to reach a given cell tower the farther it travels from that tower, or when obstacles like buildings or mountains block its signal. That correlation between battery use and variables like environmental conditions and cell tower distance is strong enough that momentary power drains like a phone conversation or the use of another power-hungry app can be filtered out, Michalevsky says.

One of the machine-learning tricks the researchers used to detect that “noise” is a focus on longer-term trends in the phone’s power use rather than those than last just a few seconds or minutes. “A sufficiently long power measurement (several minutes) enables the learning algorithm to ‘see’ through the noise,” the researchers write. “We show that measuring the phone’s aggregate power consumption over time completely reveals the phone’s location and movement.”

Even so, PowerSpy has a major limitation: It requires that the snooper pre-measure how a phone’s power use behaves as it travels along defined routes. This means you can’t snoop on a place you or a cohort has never been, as you need to have actually walked or driven along the route your subject’s phone takes in order to draw any location conclusions.

I’m not sure how practical this is, but it’s certainly interesting.

The paper.

Posted on February 23, 2015 at 10:30 AM • View Comments

Analysis of Printer Watermarking Techniques

Interesting paper: Maya Embar, Louis M. McHough IV, and William R. Wesselman, “Printer watermark obfuscation,” Proceeding
RIIT ’14: Proceedings of the 3rd annual conference on Research in information technology:

Abstract: Most color laser printers manufactured and sold today add “invisible” information to make it easier to determine when a particular document was printed and exactly which printer was used. Some manufacturers have acknowledged the existence of the tracking information in their documentation while others have not. None of them have explained exactly how it works or the scope of the information that is conveyed. There are no laws or regulations that require printer companies to track printer users this way, and none that prevent them from ceasing this practice or providing customers a means to opt out of being tracked. The tracking information is coded by patterns of yellow dots that the printers add to every page they print. The details of the patterns vary by manufacturer and printer model.

EDITED TO ADD (11/14): List of printers and whether or not they display tracking dots (may not be up to date).

Posted on October 24, 2014 at 8:36 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.