Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge • Hacker News Board

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#141

Post by surround » Mon, May 11, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #107

tinus_hn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of triangulation is nowhere near precise enough to reveal the data shown in the article. This is GPS data which the provider does not get. Remember that many people ‘have nothing to hide’ so they turn on services like Google Latitude. Then later they’re al surprised when their data is sold to the highest bidder.

> Remember that many people ‘have nothing to hide’ so they turn on services like Google Latitude. Then later they’re al surprised when their data is sold to the highest bidder. Do you have any proof that Google does exactly this? I don't like Google at all (anymore) but I thought Google was somewhat ok in that they never sold my raw data points even if they would sell accesss to place an ad to "visitors who have been…

I’m not sure if Google would sell user’s location data to advertisers since Google is an advertiser. But they definitely record it for themselves, and the government has access to it as well.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#142

Post by surround » Mon, May 11, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

TomMarius wrote: post #102

geraltofrivia wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if the SIM's anonymous, as the article demonstrated, it would be easy to de-anonymize it.

There are ways to try to stay hidden, like having one stationary and VPN to it from the second one; using a burner second/third/fourth/...-hand phone for the second, etc.

In order to connect to the VPN, you must connect to the cell towers, which reveals your location.

And no matter how many burner phones you use, as soon as you visit your home address, your identity is compromised.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#143

Post by surround » Mon, May 11, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #91

propelol wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that is true. But the issue here is that the data is being sold to others for other use cases.

You used to be able to be an anonymous SIM in the UK. (No clue whether that's still the case.) The SIM would still be tracked. Don't think whatever EU laws allowed the UK to keep some SIMS anonymous have changed since they left?

As the article demonstrates, it’s easy to de-anonymize the data.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#144

Post by chopin » Mon, May 11, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

thdrdt wrote: post #124

surround wrote: post #76

The article assumes that the location data must have been collected because he gave an app permission to access his location. I bet they couldn’t figure out which app it was because it wasn’t an app. Cell service providers can and do track your cellphone location. All they have to do is measure the signal strength of your cellphone at different towers, and they can triangulate its position. https://www.vice.com/en_us…

This is what always bothers me in movies. There is a secret meeting. Everybody pulls out their sim because they don't want their location to be known. Well.. no, you already revealed where you were going.

Even pulling out the sim wouldn't help. Without sim the phone can do emergency calls, so the phone is still connected to a network (afaik).

My paranoia is fulfilled with switching the phone off (before leaving home), but others would rely on removing the battery. Snowden recommended putting it in a fridge.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#145

Post by TomMarius » Mon, May 11, 2020, 2:10 PM UTC

surround wrote: post #142

TomMarius wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to try to stay hidden, like having one stationary and VPN to it from the second one; using a burner second/third/fourth/...-hand phone for the second, etc.

In order to connect to the VPN, you must connect to the cell towers, which reveals your location. And no matter how many burner phones you use, as soon as you visit your home address, your identity is compromised.

> In order to connect to the VPN, you must connect to the cell towers, which reveals your location.

It reveals the location of an anonymous SIM with no readable traffic, connecting to an unknown (if you use Tor) and also stationary and anonymous device, which might be planted in any random school, library, workplace...

> And no matter how many burner phones you use, as soon as you visit your home address, your identity is compromised.

Of course - don't do that with the phone on :) that's the basics, isn't it?

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#146

Post by chopin » Mon, May 11, 2020, 2:15 PM UTC

meritt wrote: post #38

saagarjha wrote: post #25

This is one of the reasons why I'm generally not OK with "anonymized" data collection without an explanation of how it's being anonymized. It's almost always easy, often trivially easy, to correlate the data together and basically get a perfect recreation of whatever the original data was back.

Anonymization in the data reselling industry is often some form of md5(lower($email)). It's a joke. They even do that for extremely small search spaces like phone numbers. It's still provided at the individual user-level and even if the anonymization is done in a way that's irreversible, you only need to know a single event for a given person and you now have their entire history. For example, there's a popular email…

That's pseudonomization, not anonymization. The former is generally not GDPR compliant.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#147

Post by carapace » Mon, May 11, 2020, 2:23 PM UTC

mirimir wrote: post #70

carapace wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think this is one of those things where, when the normals catch on, there's gonna be pitchforks and torches.

Indeed, but what would it take? I gather that NRK is the BBC equivalent for Norway, so it's not surprising that Tamoco sold so much data to it. But I wonder how selective Tamoco and its competitors are. In particular, I can imagine that there's a substantial market for data that facilitates tracking people. Bounty hunters. Repo agents. Private investigators. But also people who want to stalk others for whatever reaso…

I don't know what it would take, if anything. I was talking to some twenty-something folks in Berkeley about a decade ago and asked them what they thought of Snowden. They didn't know who he was. When I explained, they dismissed the whole thing. It turned out that they assumed the government was spying on everybody anyway. I don't know what to make of that, I'm just passing along the anecdote.

Anyway, from what I've heard these marketing companies are not very selective at all. More precisely, they are selective but don't dig too deeply. But this is just my impression, not fact.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#148

Post by kashura » Mon, May 11, 2020, 2:26 PM UTC

jalk wrote: post #89

cornishpixels wrote: post #53

In Soviet Russia, your cell provider sells this data. Wait, no, that's America. I was thinking of America.

Gramma nazi on: you mean Russia or the Russian federation if you want to be precise. The Soviet Union collapsed almost 30 years ago.

gramma as in grandma, or grammar? ;)

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#149

Post by afpx » Mon, May 11, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

harwoodleon wrote: post #48

afpx wrote: post #37

At this point, most people seem to know that their mobile data is being used. And, interestingly enough, they don’t seem to care.

A broad statement. I’d like to see the evidence that they don’t care, especially when faced with the level of detail collected. I’d say they don’t care to know, not that they don’t care. Ignorance is not a defence, even if it is temporarily a business case.

I can't point you toward public data, unfortunately. But, I work in this space.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#150

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 11, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

panpanna wrote: post #113

rmrfstar wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> coworker saying "Oh, I bought this awesome coffee maker on Amazon last night!" This x1000. I have seen people invite others to eat lunch at restaurants that only accepted credit cards in order to elicit such a data sample.

Wait, what? Please tell us more

[deleted]