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Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

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Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#81

Post by etrabroline »

martimarkov wrote: post #59
meritt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait... WHAT?!?! I mean if I think about it, yeah that makes sense to have been built but WTF?!? Care to share which email client it is? It should be killed with fire!!!

Assuming you're asking a genuine question, it's Gmail.

https://mail.google.com/

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#82

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #68
judge2020 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without consent. that's the point, they "gave consent" via the terms and conditions checkbox, and this is upheld in court since the user knew they were getting the service for free. Few countries have kept up with their laws to protect consumers from this.

> Few countries have kept up with their laws to protect consumers from this. Seems to be a US thing. Apparently people can give up their rights and consumer protections by agreeing to a contract. Naturally, these "you agree to not exercise your rights" clauses have become standard in privacy policies and terms of service. In many other countries, a judge would simply invalidate the abusive clause. Very few people are…

The US has no meaningful consumer protections to give up. Abusive agreements don't make things appreciably worse.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#83

Post by snovv_crash »

meritt wrote: post #41
cocoa19 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ultimately, free is the culprit. " False... Plenty of companies take your money and still sell your data.

Correct. This "if the product is free, then you're the product!" thinking needs to go away. The reality is numerous companies sell your data today, regardless if you're paying for the service or not.

No, that thinking is correct. What isn't correct is when people think this has some bearing on when the product isn't free.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#84

Post by sumedh »

m463 wrote: post #67
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.

They have no power to change it and no credible alternatives. Apple and Google create systems that make it possible to harvest data with no user control possible. Neither provide the ability to see or stop data leaving your mobile device. They do this so they can attract developers to their platform. They do provide "controls" to prevent some sort of data access to prevent mindful users from leaving the platform. It'…

Your cell phone service provider can collect and sell this data as well, its not just Apple and Google.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#85

Post by henriklied »

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…

> 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't quite know. Which is sort of the issue here – there's not a lot of transparency around what is collected and by whom.

The Norwegian Data Protection Agency (DPA) has opened an investigation into Tamoco [2] after our first story, and they want to cooperate with the UK DPA.

[1] https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

[2] https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#86

Post by TomMarius »

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…

It is illegal to not track and save this data in the EU.

> If you are using a cellphone, your location is being tracked. Period. You can’t avoid it. Even TOR isn’t gonna help you.

It is still possible to buy an anonymous SIM in a few countries.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#87

Post by sabujp »

jcchapm02 wrote: post #24

Does anyone know what web framework they’re using to get the scrolling storytelling effect? Is this just parallax scrolling?

real questions here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24239897/change-image-on... , https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_css_bg_change_scroll.a... , https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-change-image-dynamicall... , https://codepen.io/fabuchao/pen/xwbRaa

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#88

Post by steerablesafe »

snovv_crash wrote: post #83
meritt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. This "if the product is free, then you're the product!" thinking needs to go away. The reality is numerous companies sell your data today, regardless if you're paying for the service or not.

No, that thinking is correct. What isn't correct is when people think this has some bearing on when the product isn't free.

Most free as in freedom software are free as in beer and are not packed with anti-features.

Re: Your mobile data sold, without your knowledge

#90

Post by propelol »

TomMarius wrote: post #86
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…

It is illegal to not track and save this data in the EU. > If you are using a cellphone, your location is being tracked. Period. You can’t avoid it. Even TOR isn’t gonna help you. It is still possible to buy an anonymous SIM in a few countries.

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.
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