Yep.
Its ‘federated’ as long as you ignore a single massive chokepoint controlled by one company that allows them to block/ban/censor users of any part of the system.
So functionally, their ‘federation’ system is actually just a false marketing/propoganda campaign that may also result in crowd sourcing some server costs.
It’s psuedo-federation, along the lines of a psuedo-historian or psuedo-scientist: They pretend to be something they are not, in such a way that makes them seem trustworthy when they are in fact not.
Did… did people not know this?
I mean, I guess this is a study of how widespread it is, but this shouldn’t be news to anyone.
Apps have been doing this for about a decade, either more precisely determining your location when GPS location is on, by checking it against known stationary wifi and bluetooth things that come into range, or even just guessing your location with GPS off via the same thing.
Most people just blindly give every app every permission it asks for, just like most people don’t read ToS.
You can either deny unnecessary permissions for each app, or just have wifi/location/bluetooth off if you’re not actually using them, and/or keep reseting your ‘advertising id’… or just run in airplane mode as a kind of ‘do not disturb’ mode.
Of course… if apps are actually circumventing those above methods of mitigation, permissions management etc, … well then they are malware.
Apparently 19% of the apps use methods that are so explicit that they probably violate the Google Play Store’s TOS, but 86% of them use methods that are basically allowed.
All malware imo, hooray for closed source proprietary software (the sdks built into the apps are closed source), you can totally trust them lol.