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

TeleSign profiles half of the world’s mobile phone users

noyb.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–78 of 78 posts

Re: TeleSign profiles half of the world’s mobile phone users

#71

Post by tourmalinetaco »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #4
hinata08 wrote: post #2

Remember when global surveillance used to be a meme among conspiracy theorists ? Pepperidge Farm remembers What can we say about a corporation doing a trust score for half of the connected population in the world ? I wonder about their ego, or what went wrong in their management.

Would this be a breach of GDPR for us EU residents? I'm getting seriously disillusioned with all this surveillance stuff. At first I thought, you know, these were isolated incidents falling through the cracks, but in truth it's become pervasive and global. The scariest aspect is how individual actors have the ability these days to gather, interpret and isolate individuals from massive datasets, anonymising the data s…

One of the most sobering experiences I’ve had was reading a writeup on how someone was doxxed using ad telemetry. If that can be done by a lone individual, imagine what can be done en masse.

Re: TeleSign profiles half of the world’s mobile phone users

#72

Post by youngtaff »

tourmalinetaco wrote: post #71
KoolKat23 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would this be a breach of GDPR for us EU residents? I'm getting seriously disillusioned with all this surveillance stuff. At first I thought, you know, these were isolated incidents falling through the cracks, but in truth it's become pervasive and global. The scariest aspect is how individual actors have the ability these days to gather, interpret and isolate individuals from massive datasets, anonymising the data s…

One of the most sobering experiences I’ve had was reading a writeup on how someone was doxxed using ad telemetry. If that can be done by a lone individual, imagine what can be done en masse.

Do you have a link to that article that you could share?

Re: TeleSign profiles half of the world’s mobile phone users

#73

Post by youngtaff »

velavar wrote: post #46
slt2021 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No-one is actually breaking into a bank and stealing $$ from your account. Virtually most of the fraud is happening due to customer's own fault, not strictly bank's fault: 1. installed malware and got all saved CC data stolen 2. website you ordered your widgets got hacked and your CC stolen 3. clicked phish linked and lost your online bank credentials 4. got scammed and sent zelle to a scammer 5. used shady website t…

So true and something I see everyday on my job! it's no wonder then that financial companies have to resort to using data from companies like Telesign to view these red flags and attempt to detect fraud.

They could offer decent 2FA i.e. not SMS, for starters

Re: TeleSign profiles half of the world’s mobile phone users

#74

Post by graftak »

kmoser wrote: post #61
jopsen wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not start by supporting webauthn (Yubikeys)? How come all online VISA transactions don't have to completed through a redirect to visa.com or master.com (or may bank website), but instead we're typing card numbers into sketchy websites? (I guess EU 2FA requirements are pushing the boundary, but very slowly and often in ways that still appear remarkably sketchy). Trust scores of IPs and phones numbers is a tool, bu…

It would be trivial for sketchy websites to have fake (but real looking) "official" Visa/MC forms, or even for multiple fake "official" sites to be set up. So redirecting everyone to the One True Payment System is no solution to fraudulent websites.

It is when a bank phone app is being used as a second factor (or, when on your phone, it redirects to it). This has been used in the Netherlands for almost 2 decades[1] for online payments (iDeal) and card fraud is basically a non-issue.

[1] Before smartphones a hardware token that requires your physical card was used.

Re: TeleSign profiles half of the world’s mobile phone users

#75

Post by tourmalinetaco »

youngtaff wrote: post #72
tourmalinetaco wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most sobering experiences I’ve had was reading a writeup on how someone was doxxed using ad telemetry. If that can be done by a lone individual, imagine what can be done en masse.

Do you have a link to that article that you could share?

Unfortunately it appears the site this had been on is not available anymore. However I found an equally interesting article talking about similar things. Rather than buying aggregate data and attempting to de-aggregate it, this is about targeting an individual using previously obtained information (say email, cellphone, or physical address) and “ad sniping” them.

https://onezero.medium.com/google-ads-targeted-at-literally-...

https://archive.is/RFtK5

Re: TeleSign profiles half of the world’s mobile phone users

#76

Post by youngtaff »

tourmalinetaco wrote: post #75
youngtaff wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to that article that you could share?

Unfortunately it appears the site this had been on is not available anymore. However I found an equally interesting article talking about similar things. Rather than buying aggregate data and attempting to de-aggregate it, this is about targeting an individual using previously obtained information (say email, cellphone, or physical address) and “ad sniping” them. https://onezero.medium.com/google-ads-targeted-at-lite…

Thanks, I’ll take a read

Re: TeleSign profiles half of the world’s mobile phone users

#77

Post by wuiheerfoj »

flangola7 wrote: post #23
wuiheerfoj wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a nice use case but the reality is everyone still gets a boatload of scam calls, so these companies are farming the data and using it against us instead of for us

> This would be a nice use case but the reality is everyone still gets a boatload of scam calls Scam calls are almost unheard of in Europe. Why is it such a problem in the US?

I’m in Europe and get plenty of spam calls

Re: TeleSign profiles half of the world’s mobile phone users

#78

Post by Nextgrid »

donkeyd wrote: post #17
Nextgrid wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely would, but GDPR is not being enforced anywhere near enough to matter. Facebook and Google are still alive and you bet their tracking and profiles are much more accurate than these clowns.

> Facebook and Google are still alive Well, literally billions of people accept their privacy agreements and actively provide them with data from their phones by using their software. That's quite different from an unknown party telling other companies whether you're reliable without your knowledge based on data neither you nor your provider ever agreed to give them.

Nobody reads their privacy agreements. They accept them as a formality because these services became effectively mandatory to participate in modern society, but they do freak out when they see the consequences of all this non-consensual data collection: https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2016/09/people-you...
Post reply on HN