You know how you hear that ad tech can track you, and you think, yeah, no, they know I was buying USB-C cables on Amazon? Well, wait until you hear how bad it really is.
Targeted advertising: the dark side of releasing your data
Patternz is a company dedicated to tracking you via adware, and it doesn’t even need to install anything on your phone to work. According to a terrifying and fascinating in-depth report from Joseph Cox of 404 Media, Pattternz can track your location, what kind of phone you use, who you meet, and even a detailed report of your hobbies. It can use this technology to inject malware into your phone and provide the data to government agencies. You should probably consider using an adblocker.
"As a seasoned attorney, I have seen firsthand cases involving privacy issues and the people they directly affect. It seems that with the explosion of technology, privacy has become even more important now, simply because of all the ways it has infiltrated our modern lives in such a short period of time," Martin Gasparian, an attorney at Maison Law, told Lifewire via email. "[B]ecause technology has outpaced the law in its evolution and measures to regulate it, I would urge everyone to be extremely vigilant about all the content they download onto their devices."
We’ve heard of apps that track you by embedding malicious code into otherwise innocent apps, but Patternz works differently. It uses the live bidding process for ads, which is pretty much how most advertising on the web works.
