The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history • Hacker News Board

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#291

Post by genewitch » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 9:48 AM UTC

iamstupidsimple wrote: post #206

genewitch wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I check this from time to time and mine has always been completely blank. Even on my phone when I search for "tires in " it assumes I mean a city in the east coast of the US. Maps/Waze are only marginally better, showing me results 170+ miles from my current location, generally. I use trackmenot and ad nauseam plugins on my main computer, so my ads are always 100% irrelevant - if I see them at all. Ad nauseam clicks…

That $17k would've either been rejected as ad fraud in the best case, and just ended up funding the companies you hate at worst.

That's assuming they can dis-aggregate my traffic at the F5 gateway well enough[0], otherwise they're just saying all traffic out of that rack in Dallas, TX is invalid. A personal web browser clicking ads on pages i visit doesn't feel very fraudulent.

[0] google routinely can't, and i stopped using search because it made me do photo captchas every time. If google can't, i'm guessing other people are going to have less luck.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#292

Post by BoxOfRain » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 11:00 AM UTC

sjwalter wrote: post #197

slownews45 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is pretty out of touch I think. When I talk to non HN crowd. * Apple's efforts around blocking CASM are applauded * Folks are GLAD that cops are using tech to catch criminals * Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc). It would be interesting to look at other count…

I dunno, I mostly agree with you, but I think lately, at least with my family and friends, the coronavirus political response has made many more people much more skeptical about centralized authority figures. The narrative that is commonly recounted is that it's obvious that the people in authority are either incredibly incompetent or crazily power-hungry, and both are leading many of my family and friends to questio…

It's interesting how the pandemic has changed people's political views in various directions. Personally I've become more anti-authoritarian, on the political compass I've moved a few points further down and slightly to the left (based on the UK Overton window) while also adopting stronger views on constitutionalism and the seperation of powers. I've also become a lot more pessimistic about the power of institutions to act for the common good rather than for the benefit of the socio-economic elite. I'm very much now "I'm more than happy to pay taxes for better social services, but please keep the clumsy, oafish hands of the state out of my personal life before it does any more damage".

I've heard of people going in completely the opposite direction, taking on overtly authoritarian and "might-makes-right" kind of views too. I think the pandemic really gave the moral authoritarians and curtain-twitchers of this world a great big stick to hit everyone else with, which to be honest scares me more than the pandemic itself did.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#293

Post by BoxOfRain » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 11:08 AM UTC

dimitrios1 wrote: post #116

BoxOfRain wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>boat enthusiasts Boat enthusiast here, I'm afraid even that'll be a struggle! I'm planning to move onto a sailing yacht fairly soon and carry on my job as a backend web developer, mobile internet is good enough to make this viable and things like Starlink will make it even easier in the coming years. I suppose you can still turn off the telescreen if you want to though, if you sail out of range of mobile towers and…

I hate to break it to you all, but there are computers in the sky now, too.

I'm fairly sure you'd have to piss off an intelligence service for them to bother spying on you personally with a satellite though, which isn't exactly part of the threat model for people who simply want to avoid "casual" privacy invasions from things like mobile networks.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#294

Post by Dah00n » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 11:30 AM UTC

dcow wrote: post #254

ev1 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc). This is because those laws rarely have teeth at all. I don't want "ACCEPT BUTTON FOR MARKETING PERMISSION", I want all remarketing and persistent cross site tracking to be illegal. Period.

Cookie banners are an indication that the EU botched part of GDPR. We really just need an outright ban on tracking cookies, agreed. That’s the type of legislation people are suggesting.

They are working on a fix at least.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#295

Post by ghaff » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #253

Syonyk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is another thing rarely talked about that's quite common - people really high up in the tech companies don't use the stuff. Remember, when Steve Jobs' biographer asked him what his kids thought about the iPad, his response was, "They haven't used it." You're more likely to find the "cellphone free" group among high level tech execs and such. Why is that? It's worth pondering. I know more and more people, deeply…

I know I'm personally burnt out on tech by the end of the day from working on it all day, and I'm not "really high up in tech". But also at the end of the day, if I'm not making dinner, then it's DoorDash. If I need a ride somewhere, I use Uber/Lyft. It would be nice to be rich enough to afford a live-in chef and a driver instead of those two apps. I'm not (yet), but it becomes far easier to eschew technology if you…

I find smartphones mostly useful when traveling. I've never used DoorDash and maybe use Uber/Lyft a half dozen times a year and essentially never locally. Being able to receive texts is increasingly difficult to opt out of for various purposes but you don't need a smartphone specifically for that.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#296

Post by NoImmatureAdHom » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

sroussey wrote: post #256

TeMPOraL wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how a different tactic would fare: 1. Buy some legit(ish) dataset for marketing purposes. I hear DMVs in the US like to sell people's data. 2. Do a direct marketing job: send every single person in the dataset a snail mail letter with a printout of all the data you have on them, and a reference to where you got it from. I hear USPS offers good rates for bulk spam campaigns; they apparently live off it. That…

I actually looked into it. They are smart on this and won’t sell to you.

Thanks for looking in to this! I wonder if we could put together a swarm of small transactions that would allow us to reconstruct a bigger data set of interest.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#297

Post by NoImmatureAdHom » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

hilbert42 wrote: post #274

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a coordinated response. We don't want to invoke a coordinated response. Pick some prominent people to make examples of--people who will make many others happy by their embarassment.

The whole matter would likely come to a head very quickly if said data were sent to politicians. Seeing their own data exposed would not only be embarrassing but a wakeup call to everyone. Not only would the laws quickly change but also we'd soon learn about some of the nefarious antics and unsavory deals made by our governors.

That's the hope

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#298

Post by ionwake » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

I’m so clueless about law in general if one of these geo fence thingies occur how do you even find a lawyer who understands and knows how to stop it ?

I mean you do google for a cyber lawyer or something ?

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#299

Post by gorwell » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

sroussey wrote: post #256

TeMPOraL wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how a different tactic would fare: 1. Buy some legit(ish) dataset for marketing purposes. I hear DMVs in the US like to sell people's data. 2. Do a direct marketing job: send every single person in the dataset a snail mail letter with a printout of all the data you have on them, and a reference to where you got it from. I hear USPS offers good rates for bulk spam campaigns; they apparently live off it. That…

I actually looked into it. They are smart on this and won’t sell to you.

How do they determine who to sell to?

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#300

Post by QuarterReptile » Fri, Sep 17, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

BoxOfRain wrote: post #292

sjwalter wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I mostly agree with you, but I think lately, at least with my family and friends, the coronavirus political response has made many more people much more skeptical about centralized authority figures. The narrative that is commonly recounted is that it's obvious that the people in authority are either incredibly incompetent or crazily power-hungry, and both are leading many of my family and friends to questio…

It's interesting how the pandemic has changed people's political views in various directions. Personally I've become more anti-authoritarian, on the political compass I've moved a few points further down and slightly to the left (based on the UK Overton window) while also adopting stronger views on constitutionalism and the seperation of powers. I've also become a lot more pessimistic about the power of institutions…

>I'm very much now "I'm more than happy to pay taxes for better social services, but please keep the clumsy, oafish hands of the state out of my personal life before it does any more damage".

This is very much a stance of "oafish hands for thee, but none for me." The same institutional mass of "oafish hands" that interferes in your personal life does the same to everyone engaging with social services. And while , in many cases, you can opt out of those social services at some expense to yourself, the market equivalents/alternatives will, over time, be weakened or killed the same way as you would see with any other deep-pocketed firm selling a product for below-market prices, at a loss, to smoke out smaller competitors.

I can't speak for the UK, but in the US this has brought us such dire consequences as bulldozing of poor neighborhoods for de-humanizing, car-dependent housing projects; the near-dissolution of the institution of marriage for lower classes; and a healthcare system where buyer and seller have become so thoroughly de-coupled as to disarm the pricing mechanism completely and make it impossible to pay real prices for services outside of collective bargaining arrangements.