What happens when your phone is spying on you

I had something like this happen. My friend is a massive prankster, and I let it escalate to the point, where they weren't just pranks.

One day he came in with a bunch of goons and they seized every piece of IT equipment I had, including the fridge with the large screen. On the way in they shot the dog and tossed a smoke grenade into the crib, which was fortunately empty since baby was at my baby mama's house. Since my child support was based on my IT salary, I owed her $12500 monthly in child support. Court does not care that I'm unemployed now, and they're seizing custody.

Lesson learned, do not let these pranks escalate unanswered. It can make you lose your dog, your kid, and/or make you a deadbeat dad.

Be courageous, and say goodbye to your potentially horrendous friend while you can.

Why Pixel phone, given it's Google

The difference is that GrubHub has high fixed costs and high variable costs for drivers. A SaaS model has fixed costs for developers, sales, support etc. But marginal costs to add new customers is minimal.

Revenue may be in the billions. But they are all losing money. The smaller companies can easily be “lifestyle businesses” that hire in low cost of living areas and go after “enterprise devs” who are very happy to make $135k - $165K and don’t expect “equity”.

I spent most of my entire career as an “enterprise dev” working with SaaS companies in the bill payment space, field services, and health care.

I’m in $BigTech now working in the cloud consulting department working with a lot of the same types of companies.

I guess it depends on how you view personal data.

To me, it's just like any other data, licensing it to someone is no different than licensing the source code to something you wrote, if it's revokable the whole concept doesn't make sense, and you don't really own it so much as it's held in trust by the state.

But it seems like some people see it as something really personal and special that inherently shouldn't be treated like any other commercial asset, (Possibly because they've got more interesting lives than mine!) and there doesn't seem to be any compromise that doesn't make someone unhappy.

Revocability does make a lot of sense and I can think of a lot of very good use cases for that right, but also some ways it impairs P2P.

I think the only real solution is for private tech to achieve real parity with nonprivate tech, at least as much as is possible (Tech is almost never private compared to no tech at all, it can always be hacked), but I have no idea how that would be possible.

Technically it could happen, socially FOSS devs would rather work on minimalist stuff.

Thank you for saying this. I agree with OP concerning the article. I work in finance and if people knew just how clueless even we are when it comes to devices being compromised they would never use an app or website for banking again. Even if we can tell it wasn’t the account holder it’s extremely hard to do much more than that. No one knows what to tell the poor person either. I take a hit and get in trouble for my hour call giving instructions but rather that than see someone suffer.

Also bad for people with stalkers/abusive partners. I don’t know why everyone says it’s so hard to compromise a device/number (either platform) when it’s not. Or maybe I’m just in a position where I see it more often and overall it is hard? My day job minimum of 2 a day, confirmed not counting otherwise. Volunteer work, its not as frequent but also don’t deal with same volume of people. It is creepier though and no one knows what to do. One case working w a big agency as it involves a high dollar amount and is ongoing and THEY can’t seem to give advice that works either. Person at this point went to a flip phone.

Reset the phone? Didn’t work. Abandon all accounts, reset phone, cool. Didn’t work. K now all of the above and dump the number, and/or replace entire phone, latter usually works but not always. Sorry this is long here is my point in commenting. I wish someone with knowledge would take the time to do a solid write up for people with zero tech knowledge not just how to protect themselves but how to determine if/how they are compromised, log proof if possible (court etc) get rid of it and move forward safely, or as safe as possible for both android and IOS, a comprehensive write up. They would be a super hero. Literally help countless.

It would help people like the 83 y/o grandma who got cleaned out THREE TIMES and cried to me begging for help on how to stop it, the women whose abusive exes show up at shelters because they have accessed sms or location despite the women using precautions given to them as the precautions are not up to date with what’s possible. Forgive me, it gets to me some of the most vulnerable people are dealing with this at an alarming rate and the people they are told to get help from genuinely don’t know what to do, while I know some it’s not enough to truly be of help say if someone has a well versed ex determined to hunt them down. These people could care less about the Gov knowing all, they just want to be safe.