| > can publicly comment on what they do. I can. During a short stint in an ad tech company in Shanghai in 2016 (my second time in ad tech after running an ad farm myself in my teen years), I noticed that Samsung Internet (a browser) does not require permission for sensor data. Then, just few month later, Chrome team put sensors live without them too. > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18247690 I remembered reading about Kalman techniques used in radionav in high school, and it instantly came into my head that you can as easily reverse the process to substract clean, kalman filtered, signal from noisy one to get an "anti-pattern." And with it you can easily do whatever you want from FFT, to reverse manchester coding, to more esoteric techniques to quantitise it. Everybody in the collective got quite fired up with it, thinking about it being a "that's it" moment for us to do some sweet arbitrage on ad exchanges with it. We were few weeks from filling a patent, but it was decided to keep it hidden after all with logic that: 1. big ads will shoot us down, 2. botters will get whiff of it, 3. patents don't work for "small" companies I got symbolic premium, arbitrage results were far from super good as originally expected. At that point we found a silly thing: 20 to 30% of MoPub traffic had accelerometers and gyros playing same data in a 5 second loop! Later after I left the company, I learned of ours sales people finally managing to sell it under wraps to "somebody big" , whose identity I was not told I do remember right around that time flaming on bugzilla with either google or mozilla employees who claimed that you can't extract fingerprint from 60 hz data, and me claiming otherwise to no avail. My point was to put mandatory permission prompt on it, and I remember being turned down. |