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IPFS News Link • Intelligence: Use and Abuse

Advertisers Might Already Be Using Your Phone's Hardware to Track You

• http://motherboard.vice.com

Your phone is like your best friend. It holds all of your secrets, and there's a bond of trust—at least, you hope that there is. Advertisers may already be exploiting this trust and turning your phone against you, by using its tiny quirks to track you across the web.

Because people are becoming savvy to advertisers' bag of tricks, the usual methods of following folks around online just aren't paying off like they used to. Now and in the future, advertisers may track you with "fingerprinting"—identifying a particular device by, say, tracking its screen dimensions and plugins, alongside lots of other personalized information which is then communicated and collected through a browser before being sent to advertisers.

Recent research has pointed to a method of device fingerprinting that uses the miniscule, unique imperfections in each phone's accelerometer and gyroscope—basically, its hardware—to create a profile of that phone that can be used to track its user's activities across the web, without her knowledge. Unlike location data, most sites don't ask for permission to access a phone's motion sensors.

But this was mostly theoretical, until now.

"Motion sensor fingerprinting is a realistic threat to mobile users' privacy"

Many websites already collect this type of information, possibly for advertising purposes, according to new research from investigators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

"We can conclude that motion sensor fingerprinting is a realistic threat to mobile users' privacy," the researchers write in a paper published to the ArXiv preprint server. The paper is currently being peer reviewed.

"Smartphone users who use private browsing or clear their cookies to avoid tracking would find that these protection measures are rendered ineffective by fingerprinting, and they can still be tracked," said Nikita Borisov, one of the study's authors.


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