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New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

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Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#201

Post by xnacly »

mhh__ wrote: post #181
lettergram wrote: post #171

When Google and apple came out during the pandemic and showed the anonymous data on every city… it was pretty obvious they were prepared for that way too quickly. It’s safe to assume, you’re tracked 24/7 and everything’s recorded imo.

Given that Apple and Google are both tech companies it was probably just a (say) python script to get that kind of thing going. For google especially the data and being able to iterate is how they keep their edge.

Thats a really bad justification, if their edge depends on spying they shouldn’t exist

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#202

Post by Schroedingersat »

Tr3nton wrote: post #185
Schroedingersat wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there is. It's called not paying to bombard them with great replacement conspiracy theories all for a decade and instead paying twice as many teachers as well as getting dedicated mental health staff.

>replacement conspiracy theories https://europhobia.blog

Yes. exactly like that one.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#203

Post by hzmixi »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #113
ramoz wrote: post #27

It'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

i suggest you download netguard and block all apps from accessing internet https://netguard.me/

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#204

Post by nl »

lettergram wrote: post #171

When Google and apple came out during the pandemic and showed the anonymous data on every city… it was pretty obvious they were prepared for that way too quickly. It’s safe to assume, you’re tracked 24/7 and everything’s recorded imo.

The specifics around this matter hugely.

Neither Google nor Apple sell your location data. Other ad providers will.

This matters a lot but is ignored by comments like this.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#205

Post by WebbWeaver »

specialist wrote: post #87

Every person, living and dead, has been uniquely identified and is tracked in near real time. Source: I read the news, don't suffer from amnesia or willful ignorance. We used Seisent (since bought by LexisNexus) in the mid-aughts. At the time, every person in North America was accounted for, with pretty good coverage of the Caribbean and Central America. The NSA bought a few clusters, then wove in their own datasets…

All great points.

>We could, trivially, outright stop all anonymous trolling and disinformation. Purveyors of social media don't authenticate their users because they don't want to. Their business models require that they remain willfully ignorant.

Yes well what argument would you make, if you could or would, to change the current landscape?

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#206

Post by fsdffvsdsdfb »

sfmike wrote: post #175
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #113

Earlier 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?

It Depends.

Any f-droid app that depends on location uses the standard android location APIs. That means you're submitting what RF networks (mobile and wifi) are visible, and Google then passes back an approximate location. Once you have a good GPS lock, the same data is submitted to Google again for inclusion in their database.

If you avoid installing Google Play services, you'll have to use a framework like microG that re-implements the Google APIs. microG lets you plug in a number of backends, with a default of sending the same data to Mozilla Location Services instead of Google. You can easily turn this off and use local-only location providers that either build their own database any time you have a GPS lock, or use downloads from opencellid.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#207

Post by taneliv »

kornhole wrote: post #182
sfmike wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

F-droid is an app store that carries only FOSS apps that do not have any Google API's. These apps are generally safe. Some may require your location such as maps to function. The difference with most of these mapping apps based on OSM.org is that they do not transmit your location anywhere. You can still install other proprietary location harvesting apps on your phone. If you do so, you are just minimizing the number…

You can make emergency calls without a SIM card. The phone identifies itself to the network (with IMEI), even if there is no SIM. The telcos, obviously, map IMEIs to SIMs. (Perhaps needless to say, but for basic operational purposes they have to quite efficiently triangulate your position, to know which cell tower to instruct your phone to use.)

Having no SIM does not help you conceal your phone's location at all, only perhaps to make it harder to map it to your identity.

I don't know if any location data might leak in airplane mode, but I would not be surprised if some did, for example, through NFC or Bluetooth.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#208

Post by jjav »

candiddevmike wrote: post #49
photochemsyn wrote: post #29

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…

And yet, even with all of this surveillance, we still have mass shootings every five days.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_... there have been 337 mass shootings in the US so far in 2022, way more than one per day. One every five days would at this point be a big improvement.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#209

Post by ErikVandeWater »

ramoz wrote: post #27

It'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…

> Working close to Government... I've never seen any mission specifically seeking large-scale citizen-based tracking capabilities.

They tend to keep those kinds of things pretty secret. We didn't know about all kinds of spying they do on us for even decades after the spying started.

Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

#210

Post by MaxikCZ »

lettergram wrote: post #171

When Google and apple came out during the pandemic and showed the anonymous data on every city… it was pretty obvious they were prepared for that way too quickly. It’s safe to assume, you’re tracked 24/7 and everything’s recorded imo.

> you’re tracked 24/7 and everything’s recorded imo

If you have Android, open Google maps, open menu, select "Your Timeline", and scroll through days.

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