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Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

gizmodo.com

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Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#201

Post by pcnix »

VvR-Ox wrote: post #190
electricant wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are paranoid about your location data and security patches you should consider lineageOS and microg [1]. Awesome projects. You can have your location data stored in your phone and not rely on google. [1] https://lineage.microg.org/

This is just not enough. I want to control the baseband and I want hardware switches on microphones, location and cameras. Also there is F-Droid (only open source apps for Android) and the Yalp Store (alternative to Google Play with faked account so you don't have to own one). Hacking my device like with jailbreak (iOS) or rooting (android) is not the way I want to have to go to feel secure and it's nothing I want to…

I understand and agree with your ideas on controlling the device, but I should also point out that the network that you're on is a major vulnerability, and there's little you can do to control that data yourself.

Government regulation on telecom companies is the only way to ensure that there's even a line that they're required to toe.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#202

Post by emilfihlman »

pxeboot wrote: post #6

by comparing the accelerometer and gyroscope readings of each phone, the data could identify when people were facing each other or walking together. More evidence we need far more privacy controls in mobile operating systems.

I don't see it as inherently bad, though.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#203

Post by spunker540 »

DoctorOetker wrote: post #109
miguelrochefort wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you believe that corporations are evil and basically out to get you, but the vast majority of people doesn't. I think it's safe to assume that you're the outlier here. Have you ever tried putting yourself in the shoes of people who leave their GPS on? Can you see how much better the user experience is? Can you understand why someone who never had a negative experience involving their location data might pref…

ask some Rohingya from Myanmar?

That’s a problem with the Myanmar government, not location-based services. People have also been jailed for articles they publish in newspapers or private letters they write. In those cases no one blames the act of writing letters- it’s fairly obvious that the government that’s reading mail is to blame, not the letter-writing in the first place.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#204

Post by clubm8 »

Facebook's Achilles's Heel is it doesn't know the strength of your connections. There's lots of data points, but they currently do a poor job of parsing them. Unfortunately given their recent privacy struggles it may be difficult for them to leverage their dataset to answer that question without driving off users.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#205

Post by squarefoot »

ams6110 wrote: post #122
pxeboot wrote: post #6

by comparing the accelerometer and gyroscope readings of each phone, the data could identify when people were facing each other or walking together. More evidence we need far more privacy controls in mobile operating systems.

Or we can not install apps that do this kind of stuff.

That could mean uninstall the entire operating system because this stuff can be done at device driver level, where closed source is king and even the system administrator can do nothing.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#206

Post by Freak_NL »

VvR-Ox wrote: post #189
beatgammit wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want privacy controls, I want complete control. I'm stoked about the Librem 5 project, and I hope it succeeds enough to not disappear in a couple years. I just bought a phone, but I'll likely buy the next rev if the first one works out. I don't need much from my phone, and as long as I can make/receive calls/texts, browse the web, and can get consistent security patches from the community (e.g. some Linux dis…

Exactly. We (tinfoil hat's) don't want to go with less. Google/Apple have enough power etc. and I hope Librem5 will be here to show that it is possible to create a descent smartphone with a REAL linux (no, not android) under the hood. Freedom is only real if you own & control it - not if someone tells you that you're free to go now (to rise the shares probably) ;-)

> I hope Librem5 will be here to show that it is possible to create a descent (sic) smartphone with a REAL linux (no, not android) under the hood.

That was already proven possible with Ubuntu's smartphone adventure. What we need is a sustainable effort. We've managed on the desktop, hopefully the smartphone is possible too.

Of course there is the problem of all those proprietary IOS and Android only apps…

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#207

Post by squarefoot »

gdulli wrote: post #47
pxeboot wrote: post #6

by comparing the accelerometer and gyroscope readings of each phone, the data could identify when people were facing each other or walking together. More evidence we need far more privacy controls in mobile operating systems.

I've always been floored that people leave their location services turned on by default. I have mine on for no more than a few minutes a month. I only turn it on when I'm in an unfamiliar location, don't have my bearings, and looking at the map alone isn't enough to help without GPS.

The problem is how broad the term location services can be. In this context Facebook is using innocuous camera and sensor data to track the same device around. They could well write some code to listen to the microphone only when nobody around is talking, which per se wouldn't raise any privacy concerns, then use it to track laptops and tablets/phones by matching the sound of their fan under load or the spectral content of finger taps on the screen.

Unfortunately I believe there's not much users can do other than stopping using Facebook and any of their and similar products for good, then keep being alert because tracking people is both a business for companies and a tool for governments to suppress dissent, so anyone involved in any technology related to communications will inevitably be incentivized to implement anti-privacy features.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#209

Post by rbosinger »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #184
aleem wrote: post #159

From a comment I had left on a related thread, > Though very uncanny, this is rather easy to extrapolate even using the basic facets FB has available. But the most overlooked is photos. They are offline beacons and are to offline tracking what websites are to online tracking. For example you and a group of 10 other people took photos at the same location which FB sees as a small gathering of intimate friends. It will…

On the exact day when my daughter started first grade this year, Google Photos (which I use pretty often) notified me that it had made a new video montage. It started with a title slide saying "Look how fast they grow", and then showed photos and videos of her (not a single mistake with one of my other kids or any of her friends) growing up from ages 0 to 6, ending with the photo I had just taken of her in front of s…

I've had it make me around 3 if those already for my 2.5 year old. It's the same video but they just keep adding a few more months into it. I always save them. It's amazing, creepy and well done. I had a Premiere project where I was painstakingly trying to compile a similar thing and now I just gave up on that.

Re: Facebook Knows How to Track You Using the Dust on Your Camera Lens

#210

Post by asteli »

aleem wrote: post #159

From a comment I had left on a related thread, > Though very uncanny, this is rather easy to extrapolate even using the basic facets FB has available. But the most overlooked is photos. They are offline beacons and are to offline tracking what websites are to online tracking. For example you and a group of 10 other people took photos at the same location which FB sees as a small gathering of intimate friends. It will…

Google's facial recognition engine spotted me in a photo my partner took months before we knew each other. I was visible in a crowd in the corner of a photo at the Women's March.

Clearly Google knew who I was and only chose to expose this tag info once they knew I had a connection to the person whose photo it was. It'd be amazing, and so so creepy, to see a photo of a crowd with the identification engine run unrestricted. They have the info already.

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