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Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

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Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#151

Post by drivebycomment »

panpanna wrote: post #114
drivebycomment wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother spoofing when you can simply turn location permission off ?

Spoofing adds noise to the data, making it worth less. If enough people do it in a way that cannot be easily detected, the market for this sort of data will shrink quickly.

I don't see how spoofing is better than blocking. If enough people block it, the market will shrink even faster. It's also much easier for people to block than "spoof". Spoofing seems practically pointless and academic compared to blocking.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#152

Post by henriklied »

kbf wrote: post #117
henriklied wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I worked on this story (and the others, we're still publishing [1] [2]). The dataset we bought from Tamoco didn't contain an app name for most of the data. So instead of guessing, we're open about the fact that we don'…

I’m cautious about what apps and services get access to my location and I feel like I have good control, but I don’t really have any idea of how carriers like Telenor and Telia handle my location data. Are you planning to touch on this or investigate it in the upcoming articles?

Not at this point, no. We went into detail on Telia and Telenors analytical platforms last year, though. Should still be up to date: https://nrkbeta.no/2019/10/11/telia-og-telenor-selger-analys...

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#153

Post by Jon_Lowtek »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #6

What I don’t get about this kind of thing is that it’s not just shady data resellers you’ve never heard of. It’s also overt, high profile, branded tech companies like Foursquare and Yelp, with huge amassed data sets of foot traffic, wifi scans, battery status, often paired with demographic info or data that can be joined by ad IDs or commercial device graphs. If these companies are able to keep on truckin’ with massi…

How are Foursquare and Yelp collecting wifi scans?

-> ok so yelp bought "Turnstyle WiFi" which runs wifi hotspots at businesses like Burger King and collects client data ...keeps reading... oh god their wifi is worse than their burgers this is sickening

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#154

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

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.

"Anonymized" has become a marketing buzzword.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#155

Post by Jon_Lowtek »

kovac wrote: post #100
harwoodleon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost everyone, I've spoken to about these (including software engineers), know they are being tracked and they don't care. Actually, you know what, not almost everyone, everyone I've spoken to about this. I've got the reply "if you don't like it, stay off the internet". Well.

I do care. More must be done to protect consumers. I have spoken.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#156

Post by surround »

TomMarius wrote: post #145
surround wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 identi…

I don’t understand how connecting to the stationary device helps if you still have to connect to the cell towers.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#157

Post by mirimir »

carapace wrote: post #147
mirimir wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It turned out that they assumed the government was spying on everybody anyway.

I've assumed that since the 60s :)

Anyone remember "The President's Analyst"?

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#159

Post by mikorym »

tinus_hn wrote: post #133
mikorym wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That kind of triangulation is nowhere near precise enough to reveal the data shown in the article You don't have to speculate, the article does state the method: >> All modern mobile phones have a GPS receiver, which with the help of satellite can track the exact position of the phone with only a few meters distance. >> The position data NRK acquired consisted of a table with four hundred million map coordinates fr…

Do you really propose a manufacturer like Apple is going to grant continuous access to the GPS receiver in their phone to the providers?

I am not sure what you are asking. In the OP article they plot each point so that you can see them explicitly. They then mention these are GPS points.

Cell triangulation needs no client side data; it uses only signal strength and three or more towers.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#160

Post by kovac »

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #155
kovac wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone, I've spoken to about these (including software engineers), know they are being tracked and they don't care. Actually, you know what, not almost everyone, everyone I've spoken to about this. I've got the reply "if you don't like it, stay off the internet". Well.

I do care. More must be done to protect consumers. I have spoken.

I agree. I find it utterly disrespectful for all the engineers who are working their asses off to save the free internet when someone tells me to stay off the internet if I don't want to use a Google service. It's that bad.
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