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 1 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.
p-e-w 45 minutes ago [-]
The intended “protection” is the ToS, which requires apps to disclose what they are tracking and whether they perform cross-premise tracking.
paytonjjones 13 minutes 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.
matthewfcarlson 2 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 2 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!
RedComet 1 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 29 minutes 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.
api 46 minutes ago [-]
This is why I avoid installing apps and don’t have a lot of them.
paulirish 4 hours ago [-]
Would love this for MacOS as well.
weikju 4 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 2 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 4 hours ago [-]
What “apps” do you use on a mac?
VertanaNinjai 3 hours ago [-]
Probably a ton since macOS apps are literally distributed as .app bundles.
winstonwinston 2 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 3 hours ago [-]
Google Chrome, VS Code, among others
bethekidyouwant 2 hours ago [-]
Well “they” can technically “read” anything your user can.
iancarroll 2 hours ago [-]
Apps installed via the MAS have sandboxing applied to them, so this isn't really true.
winstonwinston 2 hours ago [-]
Yes but chrome is not from MAS. I have none MAS apps installed because they are simply not available via MAS.
ChrisMarshallNY 2 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 2 hours ago [-]
You mean PWA?
ChrisMarshallNY 2 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).
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.
> 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".
But very cool.