Recently I've set up Firefox on Android so that it always run in desktop mode. I needed to also change screen width in about:config, because otherwise everything is too small. But after this websites seem to work better.

Apps can’t tell what you do in other unaffiliated apps nearly as easily at least now on iOS that there is no globally unique identifier that apps can use to track you.

For instance, I've installed Mastodon as a PWA and it performs great. Photoprism also works so well I haven't even bothered to look for an app.

Uber for example doesn't seem to work from my phone browser.

What surprises me is how many engineers must be involved in this kind of scummy shit and keep it tightly under wraps.

[0] https://support.google.com/android/answer/15341885?hl=en

They could access your Wi-Fi network's BSSID (whose location is often public due to wardriving databases), and in public places, they had partner companies (malls, airports, etc.) whose routers would triangulate your position based on Wi-Fi signal strength and share information like "John is in the food court near McDonald's."

All of this happened without you even needing to connect to their Wi-Fi, because your phone used to broadcast its MAC address if the Wi-Fi was simply on. But now your MAC is now randomized, but it took a lot of time for Google / Apple to this.

no. especially with the value of data. Many apps just link into some advertising sdk that does anything it can get away with.

and it is unfortunate that people are shamed for being conservative (want a tinfoil hat?)

https://netguard.me/

Even browsers can identify* you, if they really want to.

*not as cleanly though, could be tricky for fingerprinting to track one user across different devices/browsers/netowrks.

Recent discussion on fingerprinting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46016249

https://localmess.github.io/

But the general pattern is that you install some stupid vendor crapplet, and the first thing it does, is ask for every permission on your phone. Native apps can access a lot more stuff than ones restricted to a WebView sandbox. That's why they want you to use them.

No thankee.

When you go to a website, they have always known the originating IP address.

Given the security record of app stores, probably not.

(It appears that Amazon Fresh has not opened any locations in MA. That's fine with me.)

I once accidentally paid for AppleCare with apple pay (a mistake), so when at some point I switched phones I had to get new secondary card numbers tied to my physical cards. The old secondaries went away when I wiped my old phone, so AppleCare was no longer able to draw the monthly payment. The number in the invoice was likewise not the original physical card number, but some other number.

Whether the secondary numbers are easier or impossible to track is certainly a question, but I believe there's always a number.

Apple charges for the interchange.

This is the same reason that Walmart doesn’t accept it.

Regulators sleeping at the wheel on this one.

A coupon could still be an image you find online that can be scanned and that’s it. Apps are totally not necessary unless they squeeze something out of the user.

So no, the McDonalds app doesn't know when you got paid directly. But it does know that you bought a cheeseburger in the last two weeks of every month, and it knows that your grocery expenses are higher in the first two weeks of every month, and you tend to eat at a restaurant in the first week of every month, and you take less ubers in the last week of every month; it's not hard to conclude that you get paid at the start of the month.

And that's without your banking app selling your info, which it might do. In which case it knows exactly when you get paid, and your probable current bank balance right now when you place your cheeseburger order.

To you and me, the consumer, the value of an app is "the same" as the old loyalty cards. But the value to the company is huge! How often you open the app (how often are you thinking about their food), how often you accept an offer, what the price of the offer is, what card you used to pay, where were you when you opened the app etc etc.

Going to be fun times when in 10 years time they sell all that information to your health insurance provider for them to go "Holy hell" and jack your insurances prices up 5 times over.

But sure, we got 20c off a burger.

First, let's not miss the forest for the trees. We're engaging in a common "hacker" watering hole. Our opsec skills are very likely not representative of what your average person has, and the point of the article is to educate the average person.

Second, most of those apps require you give your pound of data upfront, or they won't work correctly until you grant permissions.

Next, it's not the same if the establishment I'm buying chicken nuggets from ties down my credit card to my identity or if it does the same plus a ton of extra data that I've been forced to grant.

Also, one of the main concerns from the article is surveillance pricing... So yeah, you sure "saved" a bunch ($100) over the course of 1 year at a restaurant, but overall you're worse off because some data broker managed to have all airlines raise your flight prices by $500 because they learned that you're going to have to attend your best mate's wedding.

And last, but not least, the article mentioned the binding arbitration clause that one blindly signs away when accepting the app's ToS:

> Walking into a restaurant to buy a cheeseburger, there’s no way a company can force you to enter a contractual agreement that includes binding arbitration. Downloading an app, however, requires agreeing to a “Terms of Service,” and those can absolutely include a binding arbitration clause, and that clause can be applied even to cases outside the app. This happened to Jeffrey Piccolo when his wife died of food poisoning in a Disney World. Disney made a motion to dismiss because a couple years back, Jeffrey had signed up for a free trial of Disney+, which included a binding arbitration clause, which meant that if Jeffrey wanted to complain about how Disney murdered his wife, they’d have to settle it out of court with a mediator that Disney hired. No jury, no judge, no oversight. [...]

I have no words to describe how depraved that is.

Arbitration between businesses acting in good faith makes perfect sense. Arbitration between an individual customer of a large corporation is nothing but a violation of that individual's basic rights.

But imagine trying to sort out X number of people who each want a different basket of items from, say, the Walmart app. Each of those items fluctuating daily in price for each customer independently makes arbitrage almost prohibitively difficult to coordinate.

The best case scenario is something like Steam sales, where a wishlist function notifies you when items you've "watched" are on sale. There are third parties like, for example, Deku Deals that track this pricing data across time for console games.

But Amazon is already trying to banish external AI agents from any access to its data. And what does a price history graph even mean if prices are specific to each customer and stochastically varied each day to induce impulse purchases?

“Nope.”

Already pisses me off that companies make a profile of me based on credit card numbers. I’ve had this number for decades. I’m sure you could build a complete profile of me based on my cell number, and this is the only “social” site I use. I got off fb in 2008, never even joined the rest (twitter, insta, reddit, et. al.) just because my phone number has been raped out of anyone else who has my name and number in their phone.