8 ms·
An investigative reporter has changed his tech habits after what he has learned
- faitswulff 8y agoI was going to ask if all of this was worth it, but for a reporter doing investigations on Facebook, I can see why: > Once I started reporting deeply on Facebook, I deleted all Facebook-owned apps from my phone, including Instagram. I don’t know exactly who has access to the data those apps collect, but while meeting with confidential sources, I don’t want to risk that an app on my phone might be sending Facebook my location.
- chopin 8y agoMeeting a confidential source and carrying a smart phone with you is somewhat contradictory. I'd think leaving the phone would be advisable OpSec.
- godshatter 8y agoIf I remember correctly, Snowden would put his phone in the refrigerator when meeting a contact at a neutral location like a hotel room. I've also heard of people putting their phones in the microwave to take them off the grid. I don't know how well any of that actually works. All-in-all though, I agree that just leaving it at home would be best. Maybe even give it to someone you trust to walk around with it while you're meeting your contact if you're ultra-paranoid.
- NotAnEconomist 8y agoI would suggest that anyone reporting on tech agencies leave their phones and tablets at home when meeting a source. Use your laptop if you must use a computer or the internet during the meetings, but you'd be better served by an independent (and dumb) tape recorder.
- paulryanrogers 8y agoLaptop running Tails from a clean USB drive, never used in any other computer.
- barneygumble742 8y agoOr carry a dumb/flip phone. Off topic...I recently ran into my high school chemistry teacher at Costco this weekend and he said he lost his passion to teach because school do not enforce their "no phone" policy due to litigious parents. He said the students are constantly distracted by their smart phones. On the drive home I was thinking...why can't schools encourage students to carry dumb/flip phones for emergencies?!
- snarf21 8y agoAs others have said, don't take any electronics at all. Isn't it likely that other apps share the same ad networks and that your location can be correlated from that data?
- beagle3 8y ago... and wear cvdazzle style makeup or other face changing costume; facial recognition is good enough and ubiquitous enough to identify you. Also, develop a special limp for just these meetings - gait analysis is also becoming mainstream. It’s constantly becoming harder to not be tracked.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoApparently a stone in your shoe might be enough to throw the gait-trackers off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8
- duxup 8y agoI guess I just take it for granted but I would think that a YubiKey like system, and a separate phone for work that is fairly clean of other apps would be the SoP for most serious journalists. At the same time I guess I shouldn't be surprised it isn't.
- stuntkite 8y agoThis article felt like a pretty normal guy talking about how he's sort of thinking about how computers are creepy. I personally have been playing with U2F hosted on my home network and integrating it throughout my life. It's not that hard and definitely worth it when you get it going. I have been working with some YubiKeys to secure my house and my girlfriend and I's internet accounts. Recently I got a couple Solo[0] Keys. Really excited about open hardware that's not platform locked. You can seed your keys yourself and give one a massive offset then say put it in a bank box, if you lose your keys or are compromised, get key from bank and seed a new set. The Yubi and google U2F offerings are cool, but they are definitely designed to lock you in to their tooling. Buying into a single point of failure for this feels dumb. [0] https://www.solokeys.com https://www.solokeys.com
- duxup 8y agoYeah I haven't gotten far into the key stuff myself. Thanks for the tip as far as rolling your own goes.
- renholder 8y ago>...a separate phone for work that is fairly clean of other apps would be the SoP for most serious journalists. I would think having no phone would be far better than a separate phone. For example, pinging is a way that any adversary can use to determine your precise location.
- el_cujo 8y agoTerrible clickbait title, at least the actual article mentions Facebook so you have some idea of what it's about. I found it kind of funny towards the bottom when he said: >We’re a pretty analog family. Aside from the requisite phones, laptops and iPad, I don’t have a lot of gear. We've gotten to point where if all you have is smartphones, laptops, and tablets, you're considered pretty "analog".
- 0003 8y agoHe also has a Google nest (which is slightly upper class tech) and a google home -- even if it is in one room.
- krn 8y agoThat's insane. In my EU country, pretty much everyone of age 18-65 has a smartphone and a laptop, and that's it. Tablets, e-readers, smart watches, and digital cameras are not popular, and home assistants are pretty much non-existent. TVs are rarely watched at home anymore, apart from the live sport events a few hours per week. Yet, nobody considers himself very analog or very digital, and almost everyone feels like he has all the tech he really needs. The lack of large suburban areas might be the main reason for this. Most people are either busy in the city, or in the nature with each other.
- rando444 8y agoMost home assistants have extremely limited language support, which is fine for younger people in bigger cities that speak english, but that's about it. Plus home assistants in America can order things for you, get your local movie times, and have a host of other features mostly only available in the US and certain locations. Unless you live in Germany, Japan, or the US better home assistants are still a year or two away.
- krn 8y agoThat's true, in a small European country home assistants will never be as feature-proof as they are in the US, and the language support might never even be there, when the language is spoken by fewer than 3 million people. Yet, most people under 40 speak English and have Google Assistant in their smartphones, but I have never heard of anyone actually using it. Probably because everything is already a few taps away with Google always sitting in one's pocket, and people in my country still consider the idea of talking to a device a bit weird. Especially, when being around others.
- rb808 8y agoI watched "Enemy of the State" again on the weekend. Its 20 years old and a great movie. It was talking up about what the NSA could do 20 years ago with CCTVs, satellite imaging, bugs, wiretaps, voice recognition etc. I remember back then it was a bit far fetched. Now it looks trivial and basically there is no hiding anywhere any more.
- js2 8y agoThe Conversation is 44 years old, also a great movie, and while the surveillance is much more primitive, it’s no less scary.
- icebraining 8y agoAgreed, The Conversation is fantastic. Interestingly, both star Gene Hackman as a main character.
- driverdan 8y agoI love this about older hacker movies. Watching The Net, Hackers, and Enemy of the State back when they came out resulted in many laughs about how unrealistic their portrayal of tech was. Ordering food online? A remotely hackable sprinkler system? Real time video monitoring from the sky? Ridiculous! Now these things are normal.
- saiya-jin 8y agoI have trouble respecting this guy's opinion when he is so concerned about privacy but completely ignores Firefox on both desktop (stability issues... what?!??) and Android (where with plugins like uBlock Origin it becomes the safest and cleanest mobile web browser in my view). Its nice if all this tracking activities are shared and explained to non-technical folks, but these have been discussed here on HN in much more detail ad nausea over last 5-10 years
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- amphibian87 8y ago"Changed tech habits for privacy..." "...still uses Chrome" Wow
- markstos 8y agoHe should rethink his lack of Instant Pot.
- motohagiography 8y agoIf you have an ex- or a problem with someone who works at Google or Facebook, what recourse do you have? In health, we talk about consent directives for ex-spouses of doctors, and even the NSA had some limited controls for loveint, but there is a real danger. There are a lot of unprincipled people in tech now and that's only going to get worse.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gglitch 8y ago> privacy expert Ashkan Soltani, whom I’ve quoted in some stories, compares [consumers being responsible for their own privacy] to ordering a cup of coffee at a Starbucks and being told that the coffee may be loaded with arsenic, but that it’s up to you to figure out whether or not the coffee is safe to drink. ...I'd say the better analogy would be, ordering a cup of coffee and being told it definitely has arsenic in it, and it's up to you to figure out how to safely drink it.
- sunstone 8y agoInteresting that in this article he doesn't mention turning off "third party cookies" in his browsers. It's the very first thing I do with any new browser and it's always "on" by default. Sure it's one small step, but still important.