161–170 of 327 posts
The Feds have been buying consumer data for decades, this is far from new. This goes back to “junk mail”, pre internet. As usual the US congress sat by and did nothing, and in all likelihood, will continue to do nothing.
Buying? The NSA has backdoors in nearly everything through PRISM and they directly monitor internet traffic. Zero chance congress would/could put a stop to that.
Fellow humans, there are alternatives to being tracked via cell phone! Your neck need not be under anyone's boot! You don't even need to give up any functionality: Data service: The simplest thing is to buy a prepaid SIM and top it off with cash. The lovely people over at /r/nocontract maintain a big spreadsheet so you can filter by various properties of the available contracts. Another way to go is to pay for a post…
The best way is buy the prepaid phone from a 7/11 type store. Wait 6 months, go to the mountains in an old non-trackable car, leave your normal cellphone behind. Activate the prepaid phone. Put the pre-paid phone in a chip bag. Hand off the phone to the person who is going to use it but they put their phone in a chip bag before using the pre-paid one. Always protect your normal phone so it doesn't unmask your "secure" phone.
The Feds have been buying consumer data for decades, this is far from new. This goes back to “junk mail”, pre internet. As usual the US congress sat by and did nothing, and in all likelihood, will continue to do nothing.
Buying? The NSA has backdoors in nearly everything through PRISM and they directly monitor internet traffic. Zero chance congress would/could put a stop to that.
Far more satisfying than finding out your data is being siphoned and your complaints are met with a shrug and a chuckle.
I wish the apple privacy team would address this, otherwise what good are their privacy claims
The iOS location request prompt uses very clear language while allowing for granular access, and the granted permissions are easily reviewed in Settings.
The App Store requires data usage disclosures, which are presented about as succinctly as possible.
They could mandate that apps share absolutely no location data with any third party, but that would break all sorts of things (external mapping APIs, for example), and it’d basically be impossible to police.
Are there mitigations they could provide that I’m missing?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that case you can just get a burner phone + data SIM, and route all your calls/texts via VOIP provider.
I saw a post a few months ago where an actual mobile security expert publicly said they did not have very high confidence in their own ability to cleanly buy and use a burner if the stakes were high eg government actively trying to build a case against them. Since then I've been very skeptical of all claims of what you can "just" do to avoid being tracked. This problem can't be solved by individual action or paranoia…
I'm not sure what the threat model here is. If the "government actively trying to build a case against them" involves government agents following you in unmarked vans, then the government being able to track you through your SIM should be the least of your worries. If you're merely on some government watchlist (ie. there aren't agents following you), I don't see how it would be hard to cleanly buy a burner phone/sim, especially in the post pandemic age where face masks are socially acceptable.
Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the ma…
There are no "backdoors into Google and Apple." The government has to request specific accounts' data with a court order. The NSA isn't "vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the main nodes." It does full take in some countries with national security interest and collects data to or from some endpoints outside the US known to belong to foreigners with a court order. We know all of this…
I'm starting to think that it's time to make an open source and open-data platform for this. Similar in scope to OSM, but for all people. The goal of the project would be to reveal to the average person how much data is being collected about them, and how easy it is - with the end goal being to influence legislation to curb these practices. As long as it remains in the shadows, it doesn't really affect the average pe…
You should do this
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that case you can just get a burner phone + data SIM, and route all your calls/texts via VOIP provider.
I saw a post a few months ago where an actual mobile security expert publicly said they did not have very high confidence in their own ability to cleanly buy and use a burner if the stakes were high eg government actively trying to build a case against them. Since then I've been very skeptical of all claims of what you can "just" do to avoid being tracked. This problem can't be solved by individual action or paranoia…
Pure conjecture on my part, and I haven’t worked in this area but I had lots of friends in gov security and mobile standards groups.
Nobody I’ve talked to thinks it’s possible to stay anonymous on any commercial cellular network.
You might be able to push a few anonymous phone calls or surf a few hours but soon your typical browsing habits, app usage and contacts will match you up with similar existing profiles based purely on the metadata.
Honestly just narrowing it down to a few dozen people is good enough to get unmasked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS E…
I legit don't believe they can store all that data. Youtube alone creates too much data for them to process and handle. They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.