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regecks 4 hours ago [-]
Damn. The "iPhone last setup or erased on ..." is really nasty. What can a user really do about that? I feel like this should be fudged somehow by the OS.
Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
Seems like in general the iPhone was not designed to avoid fingerprinting from installed apps. Only protection would be avoid installing apps and use the web browser when possible.
saturn8601 15 minutes ago [-]
Cut your selection of apps and find/build privacy respecting alternatives for the remainder. Im trying to do this. Music is now locally hosted, Youtube is sorta kinda coming along. I've been working on reversing some of my more basic iOS apps to extract the data/endpoints they use and write my own apps. Fable really helped with this and Opus just does not cut the mustard. I hope it comes back. :/
p-e-w 2 hours ago [-]
The intended “protection” is the ToS, which requires apps to disclose what they are tracking and whether they perform cross-premise tracking.
Barbing 1 hours ago [-]
Ah, that’s funny. Too bad those privacy nutrition labels are only honor system.
They give that one completely up to businesses, then, to devs. They also thought they should let an app maker prohibit screen recording, which might promote development since it protects revenue of e.g. subtitling apps as one example. But end result is you even end up with a black screen when recording the iPhone Mirroring app from a Mac.
Apple owes us a better balance here. iCloud Private Relay for all apps (why only Safari?! and Mail and HTTP) as a start, and plugging some of the privacy holes Loupe exposes. They don’t want us abusing free trials I suppose.
paytonjjones 2 hours ago [-]
Often it's not the app itself doing tracking or cross-premise tracking, but data is passed to installed third party SDKs that do.
cute_boi 1 hours ago [-]
These days many things don't work on browser. Even reddit is very difficult as we get constant nagging.
Gigachad 38 minutes ago [-]
That’s usually a warning the service is malware that wants you to install an app for deeper tracking.
potatoproduct 58 minutes ago [-]
old.reddit.com
matthewfcarlson 4 hours ago [-]
Is the threat model tracking across multiple apps to correlate what you're doing? In that case, a single app wouldn't show you the fudging.
ramses0 3 hours ago [-]
```Based on a binomial/Poisson distribution and a baseline of 21 million U.S. device sales per release, a fingerprint relying on "seconds since setup" fails to uniquely identify individuals. In the high-density Early Adopter phase, you will share your exact setup second with an average of 1.01 other people (a total matching pool of ~2 people). Six months into the cycle, you will still share that second with an average of 0.68 other people.```
In the U.S., device setup time (to the second) very conservatively gets you clubbed into a single group of 100 individuals as an "advanced persistent threat" tracker. Even compressing activations to "80/20 during business hours" the math kindof maxes out at a pool of ~5 people, and assuming worst case "20x" of that still means you're still pretty darned identifiable.
If you get ~6-8 more bits of entropy (eg: Device Type + Capacity is easily 2-3 bits, and Time Zone is probably another 2-3 bits) you're cooked!
cute_boi 1 hours ago [-]
Just using IP address, device storage, device name, and similar signals, we can identify a user. It isn’t difficult to correlate these data points. Apps like Facebook also force developers to use their SDKs for even small features.
RedComet 3 hours ago [-]
Volume creation date is pretty egregious. I don't see any reason that and Pasteboard changeCount should be so granular.
The "Installed Apps Probe" leak also surprised me. It is better than the current state of Android, though.
xenator 2 hours ago [-]
Pasteboard counter exists to help apps to not ask again about the same item in the buffer.
And nothing stops from using reset it every day.
RedComet 3 minutes ago [-]
I think something like a per boot delta added to a (per app?) random base would preserve such functionality.
Barbing 1 hours ago [-]
Would you elaborate on both points?
Any way to reset it as an end user? (Not enough awareness of the issue for search engines to find much.)
OffBeatDev 32 minutes ago [-]
The “passive / permission / advanced” grouping is a nice way to teach this. Most privacy explanations focus on scary outcomes. Showing what is visible with no prompt makes the model easier to understand.
Yea, it's infuriating that most of the HN crowd thinks the apps are better then web. Apps can spy on you way more than web. It's the reason every website says "please download the app". If it was better for them to spy on you via the website they wouldn't ask you to download the app.
api 2 hours ago [-]
This is why I avoid installing apps and don’t have a lot of them.
iririririr 1 hours ago [-]
...wouldn't it be better to have a pocket computer you own?
normie3000 47 minutes ago [-]
Phones are quite useful.
paulirish 5 hours ago [-]
Would love this for MacOS as well.
weikju 5 hours ago [-]
Fortunately, if you read the README (and decide to go past the “this was mostly built by AI” part,
> Loupe also builds for macOS. The Mac version is mostly complete, but a few things still need work before it's polished.
heavensteeth 3 hours ago [-]
> and decide to go past the “this was mostly built by AI” part
I got that feeling just seeing the title use "native" as a synonym of "not a website".
bethekidyouwant 5 hours ago [-]
What “apps” do you use on a mac?
VertanaNinjai 4 hours ago [-]
Probably a ton since macOS apps are literally distributed as .app bundles.
winstonwinston 4 hours ago [-]
Though there is a difference what store apps and non-store apps can do. I think is about store apps which are “sandboxed” and have to use public api to request then access information which non-store apps can access without.
internet2000 4 hours ago [-]
Google Chrome, VS Code, among others
bethekidyouwant 4 hours ago [-]
Well “they” can technically “read” anything your user can.
iancarroll 3 hours ago [-]
Apps installed via the MAS have sandboxing applied to them, so this isn't really true.
winstonwinston 3 hours ago [-]
Yes but chrome is not from MAS. I have none MAS apps installed because they are simply not available via MAS.
cute_boi 1 hours ago [-]
Apps like TikTok can know which username we logged in with, even if we uninstall and reinstall the app. This is egregious, as many companies like Facebook have SDKs embedded in many apps, allowing them to accurately interconnect user activity.
Apple should be ashamed that they aren't putting effort to randomize these fingerprints....
ChrisMarshallNY 4 hours ago [-]
It's likely to be trolled by the WPA folks, who will insist that WPAs are just as insecure as native apps, so there's no difference ...
But very cool.
njsubedi 3 hours ago [-]
You mean PWA?
ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago [-]
Yes. Got my ps and ws mixed up. I was just reading about the Mt. Rushmore project (I was curious whether or not it was a WPA project -it wasn’t, officially).
They give that one completely up to businesses, then, to devs. They also thought they should let an app maker prohibit screen recording, which might promote development since it protects revenue of e.g. subtitling apps as one example. But end result is you even end up with a black screen when recording the iPhone Mirroring app from a Mac.
Apple owes us a better balance here. iCloud Private Relay for all apps (why only Safari?! and Mail and HTTP) as a start, and plugging some of the privacy holes Loupe exposes. They don’t want us abusing free trials I suppose.
In the U.S., device setup time (to the second) very conservatively gets you clubbed into a single group of 100 individuals as an "advanced persistent threat" tracker. Even compressing activations to "80/20 during business hours" the math kindof maxes out at a pool of ~5 people, and assuming worst case "20x" of that still means you're still pretty darned identifiable.
If you get ~6-8 more bits of entropy (eg: Device Type + Capacity is easily 2-3 bits, and Time Zone is probably another 2-3 bits) you're cooked!
The "Installed Apps Probe" leak also surprised me. It is better than the current state of Android, though.
And nothing stops from using reset it every day.
Any way to reset it as an end user? (Not enough awareness of the issue for search engines to find much.)
> Loupe also builds for macOS. The Mac version is mostly complete, but a few things still need work before it's polished.
I got that feeling just seeing the title use "native" as a synonym of "not a website".
Apple should be ashamed that they aren't putting effort to randomize these fingerprints....
But very cool.