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What happens when your phone is spying on you

today.ucsd.edu

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Re: What happens when your phone is spying on you

#61

Post by SoftTalker »

scarface74 wrote: post #57
walterbell wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> talking to a person to order takeaway Also supports small business by saving them double-digit app fees!

I know a couple of small restaurant owners. Even ones that don’t go through UberEats or GrubHub that use SaaS restaurant software that also come with a white labeled restaurant specific app that accepts Apple Pay (standard credit card fees - not 30%) and other payment methods. They actually prefer it.

Weird. The small places here (I'm thinking chinese take-out, for example) take cash only, order tickets are on paper, they don't deliver, and seem to be thriving. Have the Uber Eats and other tech middlemen started taking such a big slice of the profit that it's not worth it?

Having worked in a restaurant, if someone took 30% of my gross it certainly would have been all of my profit and then some.

Re: What happens when your phone is spying on you

#62

Post by YeahNO »

Liquix wrote: post #46
senthil_rajasek wrote: post #28

I found this article very shallow. It covers only spyware that are installed when a device is physically compromised. I was hoping it would cover spy/malware that install remotely through many more infection vectors like clicking text messages. I guess NSO/Pegasus malware has this capability. I barely use any apps and would gladly settle for a flip phone... I value privacy more than the ability to order food through…

I was hoping it would raise the alarm regarding Google and Apple's overreaching, always-on data collection practices. 99% of people don't need to worry about an attacker gaining physical access to their unlocked device and installing an application. We as a society do need to worry about tech giants amassing enough data on us to gain an insurmountable AI-training-data advantage which makes them too useful as tools of…

You would think the panic over TikTok spying would illuminate the problem with apps having carte-blanche access to your personal data 24/7. There is nothing that the TikTok app does that any other app cannot also do. It seems nobody wants to make that connection.

There should be real protections for consumers to prevent ANY application from slurping up this data, and I don't mean just a disclosure or system setting to hamstring the application into uselessness. I mean, there should be regulations preventing the collection of this data in the first place, with hefty fines and punitive damages.

Re: What happens when your phone is spying on you

#63

Post by fsflover »

Liquix wrote: post #46
senthil_rajasek wrote: post #28

I found this article very shallow. It covers only spyware that are installed when a device is physically compromised. I was hoping it would cover spy/malware that install remotely through many more infection vectors like clicking text messages. I guess NSO/Pegasus malware has this capability. I barely use any apps and would gladly settle for a flip phone... I value privacy more than the ability to order food through…

I was hoping it would raise the alarm regarding Google and Apple's overreaching, always-on data collection practices. 99% of people don't need to worry about an attacker gaining physical access to their unlocked device and installing an application. We as a society do need to worry about tech giants amassing enough data on us to gain an insurmountable AI-training-data advantage which makes them too useful as tools of…

> I was hoping it would raise the alarm regarding Google and Apple's overreaching, always-on data collection practices

It seems this is the article you were expecting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261.

Re: What happens when your phone is spying on you

#65

Post by walterbell »

SoftTalker wrote: post #61
scarface74 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a couple of small restaurant owners. Even ones that don’t go through UberEats or GrubHub that use SaaS restaurant software that also come with a white labeled restaurant specific app that accepts Apple Pay (standard credit card fees - not 30%) and other payment methods. They actually prefer it.

Weird. The small places here (I'm thinking chinese take-out, for example) take cash only, order tickets are on paper, they don't deliver, and seem to be thriving. Have the Uber Eats and other tech middlemen started taking such a big slice of the profit that it's not worth it? Having worked in a restaurant, if someone took 30% of my gross it certainly would have been all of my profit and then some.

NYC currently caps fees at 20%. Grubhub is lobbying for 30%.

https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/technology/nyc-coul...

> New York, like many cities, put a limit on third-party delivery fees during the pandemic to help restaurants that had come to depend heavily on the service. Last August, it became one of the few jurisdictions to make the emergency measure permanent ... Last year, it passed a first-of-its kind law that would force delivery providers to share more customer data with restaurants.

Re: What happens when your phone is spying on you

#66

Post by humanistbot »

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #28

I found this article very shallow. It covers only spyware that are installed when a device is physically compromised. I was hoping it would cover spy/malware that install remotely through many more infection vectors like clicking text messages. I guess NSO/Pegasus malware has this capability. I barely use any apps and would gladly settle for a flip phone... I value privacy more than the ability to order food through…

A university PR office puts out a press release that is shallow version of the actual paper? Why I never....

Re: What happens when your phone is spying on you

#67

Post by scarface74 »

sizzle wrote: post #5
victor106 wrote: post #3

The title needs to be updated to say “Android”

There are surreptitious ways to achieving covert monitoring on iOS. To say this applies to Android only is simply untrue. You can do things via MDM on iOS for example and install spyware “monitoring” apps/set OS level permissions that are invisible to non tech saavy users. Also if you have access to the device and the iCloud password/device pin (e.g. abusive partner scenario, etc.) then non tech saavy people don’t st…

Even with someone’s iCloud password and physical access to your phone, a normal app can’t access your phone logs, your camera while running in the background, record your screen etc, even with an MDM.

Re: What happens when your phone is spying on you

#68

Post by scarface74 »

cyberbanjo wrote: post #16
sizzle wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are surreptitious ways to achieving covert monitoring on iOS. To say this applies to Android only is simply untrue. You can do things via MDM on iOS for example and install spyware “monitoring” apps/set OS level permissions that are invisible to non tech saavy users. Also if you have access to the device and the iCloud password/device pin (e.g. abusive partner scenario, etc.) then non tech saavy people don’t st…

TFA: We focus on Android-based spyware because most of the mobile spyware market appears to be focused there. Since curated app stores like Google Play do not permit the sale of such apps, in practice they must be side-loaded off-store, a process that Apple does not support. As a result, consumer mobile spyware only operates on “rooted” iPhones. Rooting an iPhone can be a technically involved operation (one popular g…

And you think the Google Play Store (or the App Store) for that matter could even know what apps are doing? With iOS, the protection comes from its tighter permissions model and sandboxing

Re: What happens when your phone is spying on you

#69

Post by AtlasBarfed »

senthil_rajasek wrote: post #28

I found this article very shallow. It covers only spyware that are installed when a device is physically compromised. I was hoping it would cover spy/malware that install remotely through many more infection vectors like clicking text messages. I guess NSO/Pegasus malware has this capability. I barely use any apps and would gladly settle for a flip phone... I value privacy more than the ability to order food through…

Oh here, let me run it down real quick. You don't even need to be an expert.

Tracking cookies, browser fingerprinting, and ISP-level monitoring logs everything you do.

Various consumer database warehouses hoover up the data for resale/targetting by ad companies

Hint: once a business has it, at a minimum the FBI/CIA/Government has it. Likely, they've been hacked by China and Russia too.

In addition, the CIA/FBI run ISP-level and DC-level monitoring/hoovering.

Finally, there is no oversight. Either the FBI will cookie cutter whatever request they need after the fact to the rubber-stamp-anyway kangaroo oversight "Court", or they won't even bother. The CIA doesn't even need to care. The only limitation of widespread abuse is some sense of patriotism in the CIA/FBI, and of course that is pretty simple to frame/justify as needed.

The bottom line is that there is a 100% turnkey total information awareness infrastructure for any authoritarian regime that takes over the US government (see: Iraq war, false flag attacks, McCarthyism, etc). They know everyone you communicate with, your political views, your buying habits, and they will soon have AI software to maximize usitlization of the firehose for profiling, reeducation camps / gulags, and the like. The US government can deny you civil rights by declaring a US citizen an enemy combatant, and are more than willing to setup concentration camps for immigrants, and therefore "terrorists".

Re: What happens when your phone is spying on you

#70

Post by eternityforest »

YeahNO wrote: post #62
Liquix wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hoping it would raise the alarm regarding Google and Apple's overreaching, always-on data collection practices. 99% of people don't need to worry about an attacker gaining physical access to their unlocked device and installing an application. We as a society do need to worry about tech giants amassing enough data on us to gain an insurmountable AI-training-data advantage which makes them too useful as tools of…

You would think the panic over TikTok spying would illuminate the problem with apps having carte-blanche access to your personal data 24/7. There is nothing that the TikTok app does that any other app cannot also do. It seems nobody wants to make that connection. There should be real protections for consumers to prevent ANY application from slurping up this data, and I don't mean just a disclosure or system setting t…

Most privacy advocates probably do plenty of things I would be perfectly happy to see made illegal, but we don't just ban them because we don't want a complete dictatorship of one segment of the population over everyone else, and because it seems the people realize it would cause problems for some people, and we need to be careful to find suitable replacements before we ban things.

A lot of the tech I imagine you are referring to has been life changing for me, and if it cost normal SASS prices would not be affordable.

Regulations and disclosures are good, but a straight ban would (depending on how it was written) quite likely affect services that inherently require mass data collection, like Tile trackers, and might make other services have to do subscriptions and become unaffordable for many.

If there was a state sponsored Pine64 style company that could do all of what Google does for the same price without spying, it would be great. But at the moment, the FOSS community does not have true equivalents, or the budget or interest to do so, nor the marketing power to do the stuff that only works if everyone else uses it, and the non-spy commercial solutions have many of the same issues and cost too much for low income people.

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