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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

#221

Post by fsflover »

bradgessler wrote: post #133
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #127

No one cares. This kind of surveillance and massive overreach by intelligence agencies has been reported dozens of times for at least 20 years now. The most recent example i remember was of facial recognition in airports. Media reported it, some people whined about it, oh maybe the people will demand privacy? lol. Now its standard procedure. Delta even does boarding based on facial ID by default. "Raising awareness"…

Anybody want to take a shot at how all of this will unwind?

Good technology can be developed to fight surveillance in a reasonably convenient way. With time, it can attract enough people to make a change. See: https://qubes-os.org.

In addition, turning surveillance against the government could also be beneficial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance.

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

#222

Post by trasz »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #85
tremon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite China yet What do you mean with this, specifically? Do you mean that China has a more comprehensive data collection apparatus, that the Chinese government has easier access to commercially collected data, or maybe that they exert their control more overtly than the US?

Yes.

[citation needed]

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

#223

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#224

Post by fsflover »

taneliv wrote: post #207
kornhole wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, on…

> 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.

Which is why hardware kill switches are the future (see Librem 5 and Pinephone).

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

#225

Post by wahnfrieden »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #143
sodality2 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that they are fine, probably they just have no avenue to defend against that. It would be like an ant declaring war on the elephant.

Or maybe like a nest of hornets declaring war on a person

individual vs collective action

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

#227

Post by nly »

whyagain1885 wrote: post #215
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…

I always get annoyed how these programmers can have a good sleep at night given what they have done. Note that blaming it on the marketing VP is not fair. If even 50 % employees have a thought this tracking can be stopped.

"How do you sleep at night?"

https://youtu.be/GO0JaecRWy0

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

#228

Post by benwad »

philderbeast wrote: post #216
whyagain1885 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always get annoyed how these programmers can have a good sleep at night given what they have done. Note that blaming it on the marketing VP is not fair. If even 50 % employees have a thought this tracking can be stopped.

the programmers sleep at night because doing this is the only thing that lets them feed there families. like it or not, there are always people who will see this as the lesser evil because of their personal circumstances don't give them other options.

I'd agree if we were talking about low-skill work where people are just scraping by. Programmers have the luxury of choosing from a wide range of places to work. We're all in a position where we can refuse work we find unethical, even if it means taking a pay cut.

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

#229

Post by pjc50 »

whyagain1885 wrote: post #215
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…

I always get annoyed how these programmers can have a good sleep at night given what they have done. Note that blaming it on the marketing VP is not fair. If even 50 % employees have a thought this tracking can be stopped.

People are very willing to do almost anything against "the bad guys", defined by whatever ideology they were brought up with. Everyone doing this imagines that they're preventing crime and terrorism, and can probably point to a case in which it was.

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

#230

Post by pjc50 »

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…

South Korea used to require that people log in with their government ID to websites. Through an ActiveX control, even. I believe they eventually gave up on this level of direct tracking.

> We could, trivially, resolve all the policy food fights .. flash points into simple database queries.

The flashpoint is that people don't want to be queryable. You can't wish that problem away.

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