Given the FTC’s subsequent 2021 crack-down specifically targeting Flo Health for passing intimate logging metrics to Facebook and Google. I thought it was unlikely they'd find much.

Well, it's a year later and I was wrong.

Jo & Reaves found mobile apps and mobile ad networks were still tracking health data.

Their paper shows the high specificity which these events are tracked ...

Rest of my blog post & AppGoblin links (to see which apps using which ad networks currently) to the apps in paper:

https://jamesoclaire.com/2026/06/30/the-pregnancy-and-health...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48729728

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48668255

Points: 201

# Comments: 186

I think finding these communities and having a proper dialogue about your product is pretty useful.

When the open weight models catch up, if they don't get lobbied and banned by OpenAi and Anthropic, then you'll be able to use them to properly secure your software.

–Dialog is a conference. I went once in 2018 and once in 2022. No one ever asked me to keep it or my presence a secret.

–My understanding was Thiel was one of its founders but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with Dialog.

–Nor did I see the other names I’ve heard mentioned, like Ted Cruz or Elon Musk or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Jared Kushner. Dialog was not sold to me as a bunch of big names, which is part of why I went. I don’t need to go to a conference to hear what Ted Cruz thinks.

–You could be a Dialog member, but I wasn’t. I don’t think joining got you much except guaranteed invitations to future Dialogs. There were occasional dinners and webinars, but I never went to one. I would not have described it as a secret or a society.

–The panels were largely self-organized, so people would propose panels and hold them. I went to one on being a working parent and another on whether crypto had any real use cases and another on how to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. You’d usually have 8 or 10 people in a room. It was all very TED-talk adjacent.

–In 2018, I found it very optimistic, with an idealistic hacker-ish vibe. In 2022, I found the conversations and vibe more curdled and resentful. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t go back. (That did prove a pretty good signal of where tech’s politics were going though, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.)

....

"

first half of his comment about it from X

While popups and bad ad practices have always been a problem, it's sad to see that they became so bad that the response to them is to paygate web content. More and more sites are locked behind paywalls.

Also the marketing of them getting to say "our models are so dangerous" only a few companies or select users are allowed to use (benchmark) them would help keep their valuations high.

How it works?

Search the app you're interested in on AppGoblin

Go to the main App page and press the "Scan SDKs & APIs" button

AppGoblin goes and fetches the latest version of the app.

AppGoblin analyzes the Android APK or iOS IPA file for known trackers, ad networks and other business tools that scrape user data.

For Android apps, AppGoblin runs the app in an emulator to track what data leaves the app in the first 60 seconds

The results are prepared and put on the public app page within 24 hrs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473949

Points: 1

# Comments: 1