TL;DR
After more than couple dozen hours of trying, here are the main takeaways:
- I found a couple requests sent by my phone with my precise location + 5 requests that leak my IP address, which can be turned into geolocation using reverse DNS.
- Learned a lot about the RTB (real-time bidding) auctions and OpenRTB protocol and was shocked by the amount and types of data sent with the bids to ad exchanges.
- Gave up on the idea to buy my location data from a data broker or a tracking service, because I don’t have a big enough company to take a trial or $10-50k to buy a huge database with the data of millions of people + me. Well maybe I do, but such expense seems a bit irrational. Turns out that EU-based peoples` data is almost the most expensive.
But still, I know my location data was collected and I know where to buy it!
Would using a VPN even help?
Wouldn’t that just slow you down, cause some websites to not work, and leave your device showing up as a giant black hole / empty spot without traffic where “expected” traffic should be?
Although at this point I’m wondering if I should be nervous about website traffic showing up to Lemmy on a work computer, due to mismatching priorities of it (freedom) vs. the new USA federal administration (which nearly every company - including and most notably to me Proton, a provider of free VPN access - seems to be sucking up to).
Your IP address means nothing honestly. It is only a approximate location based on a IP records.
Absolutely wild. I knew things were bad, but wow…
Somehow it’s simultaneously shocking and making me think “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
