<story><title>It Takes Just $1k to Track Someone&apos;s Location with Mobile Ads</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/track-location-with-mobile-ads-1000-dollars-study</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>soared</author><text>Very interesting article, but there is an easy fix unlike the article claims. Many platforms (like facebook) won&amp;#x27;t allow you to use a data pool if there is less than 1000 users. I wasn&amp;#x27;t aware you could target specific device ids just by knowing a single id, but that seems like an obvious flaw in the system.&lt;p&gt;If dsp&amp;#x2F;exchanges just required 1k or 500 users be in a retargeting pool (or list of device ids) then this problem would be solved.&lt;p&gt;As for knowing how many users use a specific app in a location, that is an extremely fuzzy number and I doubt the accuracy of it. Almost no exchanges show you how many auctions you lost, so just finding out how many uniques you served to is flawed and much smaller than the real number.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;This is so easy and it&amp;#x27;s industry-wide,&amp;quot; says Tadayoshi Kohno&lt;p&gt;Maybe across the spying&amp;#x2F;intelligence industry, but advertisers don&amp;#x27;t care about individuals at all. This is an interesting experiment, but most platforms don&amp;#x27;t enable this type of tracking and no advertiser would ever need&amp;#x2F;want to do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>SOLAR_FIELDS</author><text>Regarding the pool size for facebook, it wasn’t always like this. The half amusing half creepy story here shows what it was like before the change was made :&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ghostinfluence.com&amp;#x2F;the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ghostinfluence.com&amp;#x2F;the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>It Takes Just $1k to Track Someone&apos;s Location with Mobile Ads</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/track-location-with-mobile-ads-1000-dollars-study</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>soared</author><text>Very interesting article, but there is an easy fix unlike the article claims. Many platforms (like facebook) won&amp;#x27;t allow you to use a data pool if there is less than 1000 users. I wasn&amp;#x27;t aware you could target specific device ids just by knowing a single id, but that seems like an obvious flaw in the system.&lt;p&gt;If dsp&amp;#x2F;exchanges just required 1k or 500 users be in a retargeting pool (or list of device ids) then this problem would be solved.&lt;p&gt;As for knowing how many users use a specific app in a location, that is an extremely fuzzy number and I doubt the accuracy of it. Almost no exchanges show you how many auctions you lost, so just finding out how many uniques you served to is flawed and much smaller than the real number.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &amp;quot;This is so easy and it&amp;#x27;s industry-wide,&amp;quot; says Tadayoshi Kohno&lt;p&gt;Maybe across the spying&amp;#x2F;intelligence industry, but advertisers don&amp;#x27;t care about individuals at all. This is an interesting experiment, but most platforms don&amp;#x27;t enable this type of tracking and no advertiser would ever need&amp;#x2F;want to do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PotatoEngineer</author><text>If the advertisers can see the MAID for each ad impression, then there&amp;#x27;s no need to be too specific about who you target - it&amp;#x27;ll just cost you more. On the other hand, if the advertiser doesn&amp;#x27;t get to see the MAID-per-impression, then the easy solution is to supply your one target MAID, plus another 999 bogus MAIDs (or, if the platform verifies that MAIDs are accurate before allowing you to use them, then you use 999 MAIDs from Liberia or some other country that your target won&amp;#x27;t visit).</text></comment>