8 ms·
You can download some of the data that Verizon retains from your own cellular use here: https://www.verizon.com/support/download-and-view-vpd-file/ https://www.
by travoc 5y ago
You can download some of the data that Verizon retains from your own cellular use here: https://www.verizon.com/support/download-and-view-vpd-file/ https://www.verizon.com/support/download-and-view-vpd-file/
When I did it, I could see they recorded IP addresses, time stamps and data transfer volume of every web site that I visited over their network, along with cell tower connections. It was fascinating.
- murat124 5y agoDoes anyone know the AT&T equivalent of this URL?
- hpoe 5y agoJust out of curiosity do you use a VPN, I always browse with a VPN on my phone for precisely that reason and am wondering if it actually works to help protect my privacy.
- travoc 5y agoUsing a VPN would protect the privacy of your IP sessions from Verizon, although your VPN provider would now be able to see all of your session information. I suspect a VPN user would show up in the Verizon data file with many large TCP sessions to a very small number of IPs.
- gzer0 5y agoI suspect that the effort required to succesfully produce viable evidence from a VPN provider such as Mullvad are significantly higher than the effort we see here from ATT, T-mobile, Sprint, and Verizon.
- travoc 5y agoThat is probably true in most cases. Choose your poison.
- flowerwolf 5y agoAlso, don't use a VPN provider that knows who you are and don't use one in your own jurisdiction.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoI am my own VPN provider. EC2 micro instance on AWS running StrongSwan. Sure, feds could dig that up, but it would be messier. I wonder what in/out logs AWS keeps on its VPCs....
- zzyzxd 5y ago> EC2 micro instance on AWS running StrongSwan Just curious, how many captchas do you solve with this setup daily? Or even IP bans? I did exactly the same thing once and it was so annoying.
- SavantIdiot 5y agoNone? I've had this for a long time with no issues. That's weird. I'm on it now listening to spotify, reading WaPo and browsing HN. What sites complain? I'll try it?
- bklyn11201 5y agoWhy pay AWS $0.09 a GB tax to listen to Spotify?
- SavantIdiot 5y agoYes. Spotify. Ahem. That's why I use my VPN... cough cough.
- rlt 5y agoYou might have gotten lucky with the static IP / subnet assigned to your machine. I set up a VPN on a Digital Ocean instance and got captchas all the time on various websites, especially ones using CloudFlare etc (I’m aware of Privacy Pass but didn’t bother setting it up as it was a temporary thing)
- beermonster 5y agoYou can always use Privacy Pass as quite often you're dealing with CloudFlare protected sites. That said, if you're using your own EC2/lightsail instance you won't see as many CAPTCHAs as, say, using a commodity VPN service. Given you can't detect a VPN per-se (if configured properly) usually the way it works is that the destination node knows you're coming from a source IP from a known VPN-supplier's well-known IP-block. If you go for this kind of setup (running your own VPN on AWS) you're simply changing your ISP to Amazon. They still might (and probably will) be monitoring egress traffic at the very least to perform any kind of incident analysis.
- aksss 5y agoAssuming your VPN isn't owned by or in cahoots with the NSA too, you're dns lookups would be shielded from view, I guess.
- kempbellt 5y agoI route all of my mobile data through a Wireguard VPN on my home's network, and everything on my home network is routed through PiHole where I block/disable a lot of tracking and extraneous junk requests. Generally speaking, this makes me feel a better when using mobile data or any foreign network (public, friends, work, etc) since I know all of my outbound requests are coming from "one location". I can reroute outbound access to an external VPN if/when needed, but it's really a crapshoot for who you trust to keep track of your outbound requests. I don't trust any VPN out there to be strong enough to say "NO" to an intrusive 3rd-party like the US gov. No more than my own ISP at least. For someone overly paranoid about tracking, I would probably suggest just using Tor, but for basic consolidation of internet access, routing through a self-hosted VPN at home works great.
- mikeastock 5y agoDo you any recommendations for a solid getting started PiHole guide?
- flowerwolf 5y agoDon't use pi-hole, use dnscrypt-proxy instead.
- kofejnik 5y agoGoogle wirehole, just needs a single docker-compose up
- koheripbal 5y agoI have been considering setting up a dedicated lightweight node on some cloud server just for VPN. I'm curious if other have done the same.
- fulafel 5y agoWow, that's invasive.
- LatteLazy 5y agoActually it's very transparent. They're required to keep that data by law, they're just making it easy for us to see that.
- mikem170 5y agoI was curious about this. I knew that logged data has to be turned over if there is a warrant. I wasn't sure if logging was mandated. I found this article [0] describing the situation in various countries, with the following info for the United States: > Data Retention Period = 1 Year for Internet metadata, email, phone records > Authorization required to access the data = Various United States agencies leverage the (voluntary) data retention practiced by many U.S. commercial organizations like Amazon through programs such as Prism and Muscular. > Status Of Data Retention Regime = No mandatory data retention regime I'm guessing the above means that metdata (user ip and also user web and email destinations) are held for a year, but retaining actual user data (email contents, etc) is not mandated. [0] https://www.privacyend.com/mandatory-data-retention/ https://www.privacyend.com/mandatory-data-retention/
- jamesfe 5y agoIs it? How do they bill you without knowing how much data you transferred? How do they debug what went wrong with your connection without logs? This stuff is barely scratching the surface of the data those companies collect and maintain, likely for long periods of time, just to analyze and improve customer experience.
- fulafel 5y agoI interpreted this to mean they log traffic per web site: > data transfer volume of every web site that I visited over their network
- 5y ago
- mrtksn 5y agoWouldn't that kind of data be massive? Any idea on what kind of infrastructure they use?
- adolph 5y agoProlly just "borrow" NSAs.
- OneLeggedCat 5y agoProlly just being indirectly paid by NSA to run it themselves.
- adolph 5y agoI wonder if this sort of activity would be detectible on publicly available balance sheets?
- danuker 5y agoI guess that is part of why Internet is so expensive in the US.
- fouc 5y ago120 million verizon customers * 100 daily entries (on average) of "ip address, website, total_data, time_stamp, cell_tower_connections" 4.4 trillion database entries in a year
- sixothree 5y agoOn my work computers I have an app that screenshots all of my desktops every 30 seconds. I have literally years of screenshots. The cost is miniscule. Meaning, the cost to record everything a person does all day, every day of the year for literally forever is not very much at all.
- electrondood 5y agoInteresting, what's the purpose?
- rlt 5y agoFWIW I think all ISPs that employ CGNAT are required by law to retain “NAT binding records” that are essentially this.
- NavinF 5y agoI used to be an ISP and I'm not aware of any law like that in the US.
- chriscappuccio 5y agoThere is currently no federal rule, law or other mandate for US ISPs to develop, construct or keep CGNAT translation records. The laws that apply in this area only apply to records voluntarily created by the network operator.