"Advertisers Might Already Be Using Your Phone’s Hardware to Track You"

Hi all,

In order to engender better understanding of the threat of fingerprinting,
I would like to share some recent research Nikita Borisov's group - a small
but significant (1% of the Alexa top 100,000) are using motion sensor
fingerprinting. Borisov et al's research concludes that "Motion sensor
fingerprinting is a realistic threat to mobile users’ privacy"

Motherbord has a great overview up:
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/advertisers-might-already-be-using-your-phones-hardware-to-track-you-device-fingerprinting

Interestingly, they were able to find some cool ways to inject noise into
motion sensor data without impacting usability. Section 6 details the
countermeasures and the user study which verified this. There's an ArXiv
pre-print up if anyone wants full details (PDF warning!):
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1605.08763.pdf

As the Center for Democracy & Technology previously noted in our Comments
on Cross Device Tracking to the US Federal Trade Commission[1], we believe
that informed consent and opt out consent are minimum baselines for
tracking technologies.

However, in the meantime, we hope to reduce the threat of fingerprinting as
much as possible when creating new standards, since these tracking
technologies do not seem to offer meaningful opt outs nor notice that
fingerprinting is occurring.

[1] https://cdt.org/insight/comments-on-cross-device-tracking-to-the-ftc/

/********************************************/
Greg Norcie (norcie@cdt.org)
Staff Technologist
Center for Democracy & Technology
District of Columbia office
(p) 202-637-9800
PGP: http://norcie.com/pgp.txt

/*******************************************/