I’ve noticed YouTube specifically has become more addictive, I never used to be one to sit and scroll for long durations before but I often catch myself spending way too long on shorts now

Even people or older generations seem to be getting sucked in nowadays

          • @LemmyIsFantastic
            0•1 year ago

            Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)

            Common. Steam does this. It’s behind a permission these days and nothing is custom or special about this in any way.

            Other apps you have installed (I’ve even seen some I’ve deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)

            Patched out and was common at the time via Androids API. Again zero secret sauce, most apps pulled this.

            Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)

            Bullshit provide some verification in the least bit. It’s a random anonymous redditor mouthing off.

            Whether or not you’re rooted/jailbroken

            Again in the API patched out several years ago

            Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC

            More unverified bullshit.

            Pro tip: when your source is a random redditor who definitely worked for tiktok maybe consider for a second that someone is just making up bullshit and reaching to push their objective.

            You’d think for being the most spyware app on the planet you could provide a source from a professional and not a redditor.

            They set up a local proxy server on your device for “transcoding media”, but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication

    • @Psychodelic
      2•1 year ago

      The tiktok videos I get recommended are way too long and dense/informative for me to be able to watch too many at one time.

      When I first started using it I made a point of skipping anything I considered dumb or any videos I couldn’t fast forward through. Now, it’s mostly all stuff about history and philosophy and I have to purposely search for new things. Still works way better than YouTube at recommending actually interesting content.