So, what's the best weather app to use that's not going to sell my location?
The default one in the OS.
How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
71–80 of 139 posts
Re: How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
When we had to go into SCIFs, generally phones went into lockers. At some locations, phones stayed in cars. But that doesn't make it any harder to figure out. But this isn't the first time people are encountering this problem. Strava has given away plenty of US military bases: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki... Russia has the same problem, VKontakte has given away plenty of secret Russian…
When I was in the military cell phones were extremely new, but I honestly don't see why most commands don't say "leave phones and other electronics at home when coming to base" and then you just tell anyone who needs to contact you to call the command quarterdeck or whatever. Examples you just gave are good reasons to do this, much like how in the 90's during Desert Storm several people figured out (post-hoc, but sti…
Because the 18 year old who really misses his girlfriend needs to have his phone on him? The operator's wife back at Bragg (excuse me, Fort Liberty now) wants to know that he's safe, to use the example from the original article about watching phones go from North Carolina to Syria and back.
The article I linked to in WP talked about how difficult the Ukrainian army is finding cellphone discipline, at the beginning of their third year of high intensity war (and a decade of low-intensity combat operations). Because even in a real shooting war zone this sort of stuff is hard to police.
Re: How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like something the NSA should be in charge of, maintaining a custom Android ROM or even a fully custom built OS/device.
Just browsing the web is enough to deliver enough metadata to RTBs to make correlations possible.
If I were the shot caller I’d have it tunnel to an NSA data center via a proprietary protocol. Then the data center makes the request with IP/HTTP, then serves the data back to the client again in the proprietary protocol.
Re: How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in the military cell phones were extremely new, but I honestly don't see why most commands don't say "leave phones and other electronics at home when coming to base" and then you just tell anyone who needs to contact you to call the command quarterdeck or whatever. Examples you just gave are good reasons to do this, much like how in the 90's during Desert Storm several people figured out (post-hoc, but sti…
> When I was in the military cell phones were extremely new, but I honestly don't see why most commands don't say "leave phones and other electronics at home when coming to base" and then you just tell anyone who needs to contact you to call the command quarterdeck or whatever. Because soldiers will just go and take their phones anyway - they will want to keep in touch with their families. The solution to this proble…
"Because soldiers will just go and take their phones anyway"
When there is a military order - refusing is not an option. And you can check if people have smartphones with them without searching them - quite easy, how they do it in airplanes, emf meters. They are quite cheap.
Also you don't have to ban them everywhere. But everywhere critial, yes. A ordinary mobile phone is basically a spying device in terms of security. I would not ask who maybe has access, but who has not.
"The solution to this problem is to kill off the targeted ads market in its entirety. Maybe national security is the only way to actually make that go through."
So I am sorry, but national security won't help get us rid of targeted ads, you probably also missed the part, where national security of course happily uses that data for themself. So for them it is way easier to just ban smartphones in more areas, than disrupt the internet ad market.
Re: How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
#75So, what's the best weather app to use that's not going to sell my location?
Apple bought a weather company for this purpose. So probably Apple’s honestly. Everything else needs to make money somehow while freely giving you data.
Apple bought Dark Sky, ostensibly in order to incorporate it into their Weather app. But, that app is the same or worse than it was before, so I can't recommend it. Dark Sky was excellent.
Re: How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
#76Re: How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
#77Reminds me of the guy who pranked his roommate with Facebook ads targeted to an audience of one: https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...
I did this once too and it worked. The targeting is much less specific than it was years ago though.
Re: How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
#78Dupe of my earlier post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39534662
Re: How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ad serves up an image hosted by the advertiser. Phone makes an http get for the image and gives out its IP. You can also target ads by geography and do a lat/long box over your target area and show a specific ad so you know how many unique users are in that area.
Giving up the IP is against the GDPR.
FYI, the Pentagon is a metonym for the Department of Defense of the United States, and GDPR is EU legislation.
Re: How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
When we had to go into SCIFs, generally phones went into lockers. At some locations, phones stayed in cars. But that doesn't make it any harder to figure out. But this isn't the first time people are encountering this problem. Strava has given away plenty of US military bases: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki... Russia has the same problem, VKontakte has given away plenty of secret Russian…
This is a scary thought. Not because I think I'm worthy of being targeted, but because I think in the future there'll be enough compute and incentives to automatically scan everyone for out-of-the-ordinary behavior via neural models.
The killer drones will remind you of what ordinary behavior is so you aren't tempted to deviate.