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CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

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Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#151

Time to go back to leaving the phone at home, like when it was wired to the house

Faraday bags are quite inexpensive.

Effectively leaving it at home? Once you unwrap it at your destination, haven't you not only given up your travel history (maybe not to an intermediate location), but also flagged yourself as someone that is hiding something?

I guess my point is, you can't hide yourself from the government this way. From some random third party, sure.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone name a scarrier (sp) entity that could be tracking you? ... The Mafia? Any other criminal or terrorist organization or individual? The police operating under an incorrect warrant? A creepy ex? Unless you buy into conspiracies, the CDC is at worst going to do what it thinks is best for you, and is constrained by constitutional checks and balances.

>... The Mafia? Any other criminal or terrorist organization or individual? The police operating under an incorrect warrant? A creepy ex? The mafia is easy. Pay them and they DGAF what you do. Creepy ex is more or less a non-issue because any threat of violence one person can bring can be matched by another one person. It's the police, terrorists and other well resourced but potentially capricious organizations (like…

Those horrors in history were created through the combination of good intentions (also integral to the best of human history), and the dehumanization of subgroups. What exactly do you fear from the CDC, and who do you fear they will do it to? Not just a challenge, a genuine question.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#153

See the issue here is that this data exists at all and it’s purchasable by any group. I feel like the CDC are the least scary people buying this data. And from the looks of it they used it for medical research, which if similar in style to other medical research is bound by boards and ethics committees. What we aren’t writing about in this article are the groups using this data Cambridge Analytica style to sway polit…

The government having it is the most scary, because they have a monopoly on violence.

The second amendment contradicts this idea.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#154
post #11

I got free academic access to this dataset. The data is anonymized and aggregated to the census block level (500 people). It does not allow for the kind of tracking that the article is fear mongering about.

No such thing as anonymity data

Wow, this anonymous person leaves your house every morning and comes back!

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#155
Is there actually ways to use GPS data that is anonymous? Like could there be zero knowledge proofs to draw correlations without revealing actual location data? We've clearly seen that aggregating data is not enough. But I'm wondering if there is actually a form of strong anonymity that is possible when dealing with GPS data. To me GPS data seems the most concerning with user tracking.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#156

See the issue here is that this data exists at all and it’s purchasable by any group. I feel like the CDC are the least scary people buying this data. And from the looks of it they used it for medical research, which if similar in style to other medical research is bound by boards and ethics committees. What we aren’t writing about in this article are the groups using this data Cambridge Analytica style to sway polit…

> CDC are the least scary people buying this data Most buyers probably just want to target advertising at me, or otherwise grab my attention. The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions. And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science". Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you? I don't…

> The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions. And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science". Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you?

This describes every AdTech firm to a T, except that you’ve decided to direct your ire at a public health agency instead of them. The entire point of commercial advertising is to nudge your purchasing behavior (what they’ll blithely refer to as “lifestyle”); the CDC has no such motive.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#157

See the issue here is that this data exists at all and it’s purchasable by any group. I feel like the CDC are the least scary people buying this data. And from the looks of it they used it for medical research, which if similar in style to other medical research is bound by boards and ethics committees. What we aren’t writing about in this article are the groups using this data Cambridge Analytica style to sway polit…

The government having it is the most scary, because they have a monopoly on violence.

This is true in the abstract but adds nothing to the discussion if you actually had to make a decision.

Lumping everything into "Government" and not government is partly why American society is completely broken in some regards.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#158

See the issue here is that this data exists at all and it’s purchasable by any group. I feel like the CDC are the least scary people buying this data. And from the looks of it they used it for medical research, which if similar in style to other medical research is bound by boards and ethics committees. What we aren’t writing about in this article are the groups using this data Cambridge Analytica style to sway polit…

> CDC are the least scary people buying this data Most buyers probably just want to target advertising at me, or otherwise grab my attention. The CDC wants a say in how people live their lives and thinks they know better than individuals about risk tolerance and decisions. And they seem to think they can have unchecked power by invoking "science". Can someone name a scarrier entity that could be tracking you? I don't…

While it IS creepy for a government to track people I think the problem is not the CDC, it's the police, FBI, secret service and other "you can go to jail if I think you were 15 meters too close to that agent that got shot last week". Does that answer your question?

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#159
post #16

Time to go back to a non-connected Garmin GPS while in the car and slip my phone into a mesh bag when not in use :( So glad I don't own a newer car with a cellular modem built into it. Hope I can die and be buried with my current "dumb" cards.

You better rip out your TPMS since those can be tracked. Same with anything that has bluetooth since those are widely tracked on highways for monitoring traffic flows. Oh and license plate readers, not sure how you block those. Can you live a cash only life as well since credit cards are obviously tracked. Do you own a home? Is it in your name or did you set up an LLC to purchase it? I'm not trying to be a jerk, just…

Also, only travel on very overcast days.

Re: CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed lockdown orders

#160
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads is just one of their businesses, consider FBLogin and 3rd party data-access e.g. full-name, date-of-birth, email address, friends, the list goes on...

I don't use FB, but don't you typically have to explicitly opt in to this kind of sharing? There is a world of difference between that and companies you can't really opt out of doing business with if you want to live in mainstream society (cell providers, banks, etc.) making you click 'agree' on some 50k line dump of legalese and then selling granular, non-anonymous personal data to anyone willing to pay. Frankly, th…

I spent a couple of decades in big-tech, and of-that did adtech for about 5yrs - we captured, aggregated, cooked out activity streams from billions of toolbar, browser, and beacon events per day, for real-time, long and short-term user profiles for around a couple of hundred million people - primarily for feeding the ad-exchange behavioral targeted ads. Back then about 80% of the active internet users. This was a huge business even back then - billions.

Since then the world and his wife have captured data and inserted telemetry beacons everywhere. Consider how many services you use that are today subsidized by “anonymized” selling/trading/sharing/merging user event streams - the TV your watching, your cellphone provider selling user behaviour data, even your ISP is selling your DNS lookups - they’re all at it now. Worse, mobile has made it much easier to install platform frameworks that offer developer features in return for data-collection such as location, user profile etc.

I don’t think it’s overblown - that “anonymity” isn’t that anonymous when you add enough dimensions - you just haven’t seen how massive the data broker business is.

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