Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 211 posts

Re: Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

#141

Post by braythwayt »

vermontdevil wrote: post #20
dvtrn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading that article reminds me of a rather prophetically-accurate movie starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman "Emeny of the State"[0]. Granted, for a film that came out in 1998 it probably wasn't too hard to guess where things were headed w/rt surveillance compared to how seemingly prescient writings from the likes of Orwell and Bradbury were for their respective times. What stands out to me about the movie (because…

Hackman was also in another movie about spying and paranoia - The Conversation. Great movie. I know it’s not about nation states spying but wanted to add that here

Francis Ford Coppola said that “The Conversation” was his favourite Francis Ford Coppola movie.

Watching “Enemy of the State,” it is quite clear that Hackman’s character is a nod at The Conversation’s Harry Caul. He plays an ex-spook who is extremely paranoid about surveillance, which is the exact state Caul gets into at the end of The Conversation!

Re: Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

#142

Post by godelski »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #100
sbov wrote: post #90

I turned off almost all tracking in Android a while ago, but never scanned the data it collected. I recently looked at what data was associated with my Google account, and there I saw: every voice command I ever issued my phone, and when I used what app. I could see at 9:30am I opened my camera app. I can see I viewed a notification at 9:45am. And so on. I deleted it all, but my guess is it probably still lives somew…

In addition to this, if the data exists, at some point in the future it will be compromised. The only way to avoid this is to not collect it. And to anyone who says “I have nothing to hide” — imagine your worst enemy having all this information about you easily searchable with the intention to weaponize it for their purpose.

> And to anyone who says “I have nothing to hide”

To anyone saying that, they need to stop quoting Nazi propaganda. Term is coined by (but not originating from) Goebbels.

Note: The origin is from a fictional dystopia.

Re: Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

#144

Post by caprese »

Jerry2 wrote: post #127
mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone recommend a good alternative for iOS to do just this?

Just go into Settings and disable "Background App Refresh" for all the apps you don't want running in the background. And also check your Battery section to see which apps use the battery the most. I'm a recent convert to iOS (I've used Android for 7+ years) and I find that it "phones home" a lot less than Android. You can easily run a Wireshark and confirm it yourself. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/id…

I like how “a lot less” is the new standard, compared to “at all”

Re: Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

#145

Post by godelski »

DontGiveTwoFlux wrote: post #2

The article describes a case where an innocent man had to spend a week in jail. Eventually, he was released and the presumed actual perpetrator was caught. The lead seemed to come from the location data, so it wasn’t useless at least. But the so called justice system says that it got it right here. The innocent man lost his job when he couldn’t work for a week. Depending on his situation he could miss rent and be evi…

The thing I find sad about this is that Blackstone's Formulation[0] has been part of American common law for a long time (innocent until proven guilty). It was influential to founders like Franklin and Adams. It is clearly something we need to defend. Law isn't perfect, and we need to decide when it breaks down which mode of failure it has. Blackstone would say that it should fail that guilty people go free as opposed to failing and having innocent people have that freedom stripped from them (on the principle that freedom is such a valuable thing).

[0] "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" (Franklin's rephrasing)

Re: Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

#146

Post by [deleted] »

deogeo wrote: post #105
isoskeles wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's agree to disagree. I think that detaining an innocent person against their will is bad policing.

But how could it be avoided? The police don't operate on 'guilty' and 'innocent', but on 'suspect' - even if they do everything right, they'll occasionally arrest someone that will later turn out to be innocent. If they're responding to an emergency, they simply don't have time to determine guilt with much accuracy, and are just focusing on protecting possible victims. And if they're arresting someone being prosecute…

[deleted]

Re: Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

#147

Post by godelski »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #60

The interesting thing is that from the article, it seems to me like the only data these searches are using is location history, so if that one is off, you should be unaffected.

> so if that one is off, you should be unaffected.

Problem is that you can't turn it off.

Re: Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

#148

Post by caprese »

> Months after his release, Mr. Molina was having trouble getting back on his feet. After being arrested at work, a Macy’s warehouse, he lost his job. His car was impounded for investigation and then repossessed.

/Facepalm

But before I go further on the social commentary, can we confirm that the arrest at work was the reason he lost his job, the week of being in jail being the reason he lost his job, performance due to the arrest being the reason?

Re: Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

#149

Post by Jerry2 »

caprese wrote: post #144
Jerry2 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just go into Settings and disable "Background App Refresh" for all the apps you don't want running in the background. And also check your Battery section to see which apps use the battery the most. I'm a recent convert to iOS (I've used Android for 7+ years) and I find that it "phones home" a lot less than Android. You can easily run a Wireshark and confirm it yourself. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/id…

I like how “a lot less” is the new standard, compared to “at all”

Well, if you look at the study [0] you can see that you can get rid of the most of the tracking by disabling App Background Refresh, removing the Google apps and by running a content blocker. If you do all those steps, Big Google won't be getting much identifiable data about you.

>Both Android and Chrome send data to Google even in the absence of any user interaction. Our experiments show that a dormant, stationary Android phone (with Chrome active in the background) communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour. In fact, location information constituted 35% of all the data samples sent to Google. In contrast, a similar experiment showed that on an iOS Apple device with Safari (where neither Android nor Chrome were used), Google could not collect any appreciable data (location or otherwise) in the absence of a user interaction with the device.

>While using an iOS device, if a user decides to forgo the use of any Google product (i.e. no Android, no Chrome, no Google applications), and visits only non-Google webpages, the number of times data is communicated to Google servers still remains surprisingly high. This communication is driven purely by advertiser/publisher services. The number of times such Google services are called from an iOS device is similar to an Android device. In this experiment, the total magnitude of data communicated to Google servers from an iOS device is found to be approximately half of that from the Android device.

[0] https://digitalcontentnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/DC...

Re: Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police

#150

Post by refurb »

HenryBemis wrote: post #108
sbov wrote: post #90

I turned off almost all tracking in Android a while ago, but never scanned the data it collected. I recently looked at what data was associated with my Google account, and there I saw: every voice command I ever issued my phone, and when I used what app. I could see at 9:30am I opened my camera app. I can see I viewed a notification at 9:45am. And so on. I deleted it all, but my guess is it probably still lives somew…

I installed NoRoot Firewall, it has a "Access Log" tab, that logs all connections (allowed or block). My phone just didn't shut up'. Every other second some app (that wasn't in the foreground) was talking to some IP. My battery was getting slaughtered and my privacy as well. I proceeded to disable the "Run in background" almost every application, kept only a handful that are really needed (e.g. Signal). Since then my…

Question - does stopping apps from running in the background actually help privacy?

Can’t the app just buffer all that data (including time stamps) and just send it when you use it again?

Or is the app truly “turned off”?

Post reply on HN