I'm more concerned that this data is available for sale in the first place. There should be a limit on the length of location history a telecom can collect for individual phone numbers and that data should never leave the telecom. We need stronger laws.
New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
191–200 of 327 posts
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#192Sooo tl:dr; what IS the scale?
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> virtually every mobile app Reminder to readers to use F-Droid
naive question, if you use f droid and you have location services on, use a bunch of social apps, have google maps on it, use it normally, what extra layer will f droid have with all of those leaks anyways?
None. F-Droid is just an app store whose apps tend to be very safe. It isn't a program to protect you from apps that you installed from other stores, or from google.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#194These are the engineers and PM types that have know this for years:
- security engineering
- privacy engineering
- digital marketing
- data science
Maybe the first two did a vocal but bad job raising the flag due to how antagonistic some of that dialogue goes.
But to this whole post acting surprised - look around at what you work on and who with, and what you’re paid for doing it. Be the change you want to see, but people in tech acting surprised about this seems extremely disingenuous.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#195It's important everyone becomes educated about the fact that virtually every mobile app sells some part of your data that leads to some private company possessing the ability to draw a circle around your house on map and then detect all patterns of life without any PII. I don't think it's fair to pit this as a US gov't surveillance problem. It's true though - the Government missions involved, where this type of data…
> virtually every mobile app Reminder to readers to use F-Droid
F-Droid then DNS66
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#196The 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.
Agreed that this has been going on for years and Congress has done nothing to date. But ... The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, sponsored by Senators Wyden and Paul, has a hearing tomorrow morning -- and may actually have decent chance to pass Congress this session. If you're in the US, EFF's "Tell Congress: The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale" page has a web form to encourage your representatives to support t…
I’ve just given up on the federal government. It stopped working for common people in any meaningful way a long time ago.
State and local, sure, but federal? Why bother.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#197I'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…
I may be interested in helping with this, if needed.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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. 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 ab…
I think "you want to do a communication that can't be later printed out and used against you publicly" is the threat model.
You can't really protect yourself from the US government in any meaningful sense if they decide to end or ruin your life, but what I described above seems like a reasonable thing that people would want to do for reasons both legal and not.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#199I have nothing to hide from our Beloved Leader.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#200I'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…
Let's assume you make a platform like that.
What prevents it from becoming just another surveillance platform?