Tracking articles

aliexpress browser tracking homepage audio brave

AliExpress was silently running audio in your browser to fingerprint and track your device

A Bluetooth glitch exposed AliExpress's hidden audio fingerprinting
A hot potato: As cookies become a less reliable way to track people online, AliExpress may be showing how far companies will go to fill that gap. Researchers found code on the site's homepage that ran silent audio processes in the browser. Tied to Alibaba's security systems, the scripts tap a device's own audio hardware to generate a signal and measure the tiny, device-specific ways it comes back – producing something close to a fingerprint that doesn't need a single cookie to work. It's the kind of tracking a user would likely never notice.
san francisco parking enforcement tracking

San Francisco shuts down website that helped drivers avoid parking tickets – four hours after launch

Leaderboard showed five officers racking up over $15,000 in daily parking fines
What just happened? A website that helped San Francisco residents avoid parking tickets has been effectively killed off by the city, just hours after it went live and was in the process of going viral. Find My Parking Cops stopped working after the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) changed the government site where the tool was scraping its data, blocking its access to the information.
meta yandex android browser tracking

Meta and Yandex bypassed Android privacy to link anonymous web browsing to app users

Millions of Android users are discovering their online identities are not as private as they thought
A hot potato: For years, the privacy of Android users browsing the web has been quietly compromised by a sophisticated tracking method employed by two of the world's largest tech companies: Meta and Yandex. According to recent research, both companies have exploited legitimate browser-to-app communication protocols to covertly link anonymous web activity with the identities of users logged into native apps like Facebook, Instagram, and various Yandex services on Android devices.