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New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking

hunglee2 4y ago
I used to be skeptical of the skeptics, thought they were paranoid to worry about 'big tech' snooping and tracking our lives. Turns out it is not big tech but 'big govt' that I should've been worried about. We are in danger of turning into a surveillance state
- Mo3 4y ago
  Damn, even most of what we know is already a decade old information. I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligence agencies had much more crazy new projects going on the last few years. I also suspect there will be a point in the future where they’ll break encryption and we won’t find out until years later.. they already started looking into building a quantum computer in 2014, and I’d bet it’s not necessarily for morally acceptable research.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    > I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligence agencies had much more crazy new projects going on the last few years. You mean like flying surveillance helicopters with really, really nice gear in them over major cities for days/weeks?
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      s/helicopters/planes
  - gruez 4y ago
    >I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligence agencies had much more crazy new projects going on the last few years. except this isn't even from "the intelligence agencies", it's from data brokers: >The bulk of the data that CBP obtained came from its contract with Venntel, a location data broker that aggregates and sells information quietly siphoned from smartphone apps
    - Mo3 4y ago
      What I meant is, I wouldn't be surprised if the actual intelligence agencies themselves had much more crazy projects going on.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I suspect the intelligence agencies are still in absolute surprise that all their hard work was for nothing and everyone will happily tell Facebook, Google, et al everything with no prodding at all, and all they have to do is slurp it up.
- api 4y ago
  One thing I’d love to know is whether there is an upside and if so how much. How many kidnapping victims get found or violent plots foiled by this tech vs old school police work? Of course I suspect this info would be hard to get. Authorities would likely cook the books to make these things look more valuable than they really are.
  - fsflover 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance#Purposes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance#Purposes
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Using it for kidnappings would draw attention to it, and remove the pretext for expanding it.
- 01100011 4y ago
  We are a surveillance state. We(geeks) all made a fuss over it about 20 years ago and no one seemed to care so here we are. Every so often someone new realizes it, freaks out, and not much changes. I wish I weren't so cynical but at some point I just got tired of losing sleep over it.
  - neilalexander 4y ago
    Making a fuss just isn’t enough when the majority of people still want the devices that are being used to spy on them.
  - Retric 4y ago
    The difference is surveillance states have historically leveraged people rather than passive tracking. It’s wildly different knowing your friends, family, even children are being indoctrinated to report you for things that may or may not have happened at which point you just disappear like many people you never heard from again. It’s actively stressful in a way that cellphones just don’t evoke.
    - asdff 4y ago
      People with a bag of weed in their pocket in middle america probably feel the same way
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        asdff 4y ago
        White or not if you are only middle class in middle america that ticket for the weed and steeper paraphernalia charge are going to hurt. Good luck getting the dumb things you've done as a teenager expunged unless you are actually upper class in middle america and therefore have access to legal council that your parents bankroll.
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  I've worked for the Federal Government and for a variety of ad-tech companies. I am still much more terrified of "big tech" (and small tech) than "big government". When I worked for the government I wanted to scrape some publicly available data from the web. Because the data involved information about people I had to write up a document explaining exactly what I was using the data for, exactly what information I would be collecting and why it was necessary, explain where the data was to be stored, and most importantly specify exactly how long I needed the data and when and how it would be safely removed. This had to be approved by a privacy officer. I was shocked, because this is data that I, as a private citizen, could easily scrape. I asked why I had to do something so involved for a project I could easily do in my spare time. The answer I got was this: Because the government has extra authority they also have extra responsibility. As government employees we have more power to impact people's lives so it is our responsibility to be very explicit is what we do and why we are doing in. In ad-tech there are oceans of data that are not publicly available, and in the US virtually zero restriction who looks at that data and what they can do with it. I've watched people move around town via trackers when the use they web, seen where they got coffee and seen which doctor they go to. I used this information to demonstrate to the legal team at previous company to care about user privacy. They were shocked but in the end made no real policy decision. Some of the big players likely have tighter security but only for business/PR reasons. I can assure you that a random data engineer at a mid-sized tech company has far more access to your personal secrets than an FBI agent. Don't get me wrong, there are agencies in the government that have more surveillance power than they should and it is ripe for abuse. But don't think "it's not big tech", especially since there is a ultimately a thin line between big tech and big govt.
  - yupper32 4y ago
    > Because the data involved information about people I had to write up a document explaining exactly what I was using the data for, exactly what information I would be collecting and why it was necessary, explain where the data was to be stored, and most importantly specify exactly how long I needed the data and when and how it would be safely removed. This just sounds like a design doc, which I do regardless of if it has to get reviewed by a privacy team or I'm doing anything sensitive. Maybe it's because I've worked for mostly google & ex-googler run companies, but this is just standard practice for me.
- slackfan 4y ago
  To quote the late Steve Jobs: "Government is the biggest monopoly of them all". Considering most data collection firms will happily sell to the feds, it's really not that much of a difference in the end.
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- freeAgent 4y ago
  I think it's becoming increasingly apparent that there's not much difference between "Big Tech" and "Big Government." As this article makes clear, they have a symbiotic relationship with each other. Big Tech makes money from Big Government, which uses Big Tech to get around restrictions on what it's allowed to do on its own.
  - Smoosh 4y ago
    The trouble with big-everything is that they are indeed the big players, and therefore heavily invested in the status quo, and are the ones with power and influence. They don't want to fix things we see as problems, because they're doing just fine thank you. Another instance of "Fuck you, I've got mine".
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- _moof 4y ago
  por qué no los dos dot gif, my friend.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  They're the same people.
tomohawk 4y ago
When it came out that government was looking at all of the data on the internet, there was a massive effort to move to https. Everyone got involved. Why can't these same companies and organizations push for phones to be anonymous? Why should a 'phone' be primarily a person tracker that happens to have voice communications built in?
- gruez 4y ago
  It's literally not possible because the mobile network needs to know where your phone is so it can route packets to the tower that you're connected.
  - tomohawk 4y ago
    But it doesn't need to know who you are. The whole problem is that a person's identity is more and more entangled with a tracking device.
    - gruez 4y ago
      In that case you can just get a burner phone + data SIM, and route all your calls/texts via VOIP provider.
      - giraffe_lady 4y ago
        I saw a post a few months ago where an actual mobile security expert publicly said they did not have very high confidence in their own ability to cleanly buy and use a burner if the stakes were high eg government actively trying to build a case against them. Since then I've been very skeptical of all claims of what you can "just" do to avoid being tracked. This problem can't be solved by individual action or paranoia it's too big and complex now.
        gruez 4y ago
        >an actual mobile security expert publicly said they did not have very high confidence in their own ability to cleanly buy and use a burner if the stakes were high eg government actively trying to build a case against them. I'm not sure what the threat model here is. If the "government actively trying to build a case against them" involves government agents following you in unmarked vans, then the government being able to track you through your SIM should be the least of your worries. If you're merely on some government watchlist (ie. there aren't agents following you), I don't see how it would be hard to cleanly buy a burner phone/sim, especially in the post pandemic age where face masks are socially acceptable.
sva_ 4y ago
I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements we consume? Looking back at some of the European revolutions, it doesn't seem like so much is missing to cause an urge to revolt in people. So what is different? Why do we repeatedly allow this to happen?
- bwestergard 4y ago
  "Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full" Among sociologists and political theorists, this is known as an "embourgeoisement thesis". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embourgeoisement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embourgeoisement
  - lioeters 4y ago
    Today I learned, thanks for a new word. And its opposite: "proletarianization".
- asdff 4y ago
  I think the problems affecting the system are just too widespread and bespoke for the individual to resolve. To actually understand fully the scope of tracking etc, you probably need to be qualified to be a computer engineer or someone with a similar resume. That limits the amount of the population that is even capable of comprehending the news to a small sliver. Extend that to any field: biology, law, physics, economics, etc. Popular science reporting is terrible because the writers and the readers both lack sufficient debth to put things in context. Earnest law reporting is going to take a law degree as well as a stack of books to put things in their actual context. Economics is even worse; they say a grand unifying theory of economics is impossible because of the time it takes to study all its various schools of economic theory means it cannot be done in a single human lifetime. The great danger of having the knowledge of all things in our society be limited to a handful of siloed specialists is that it leaves a lot of room for placing opinion, biased, or slanted reporting to the same weight as the actual facts, since no one is qualified to see what is true and what isn't. It allows people who have no experience on a given issue to be in control of its outcomes, which invites graft sooner than learned experience.
g8oz 4y ago
I'm wondering when citizen vigilante groups will start buying location data from these brokers to solve crimes.
- corrral 4y ago
  Or foreign governments or corporations (think: taking down a competitor or extorting business favors) for blackmail purposes.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Who says they don’t?
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  More like malicious criminal organizations that want to ensure you pay off your gambling debts
- kelnos 4y ago
  I'm surprised no one has bought location data for prominent Congresspersons and used it to embarrass them into writing up laws around this.
  - ccvannorman 4y ago
    They have. John Oliver did it this year, and it was f*king great! https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/last-week-tonight-john-oliver-recap-season-9-episode-7-congress-data-1335598/ https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/last-we...
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nixpulvis 4y ago
We need to demand more options on technology platforms! We cannot impose effective consumer pressure when we are forced to choose between two locked down App Stores which make it impossible to categorically prevent these kinds of malicious actions. How long do you think it would take for a "Little Snitch"-like application to pop up that firewalls location API access if the platforms were more open?
- HKH2 4y ago
  We clearly have options. On an Android phone, you can install F-Droid, and you can flash a custom Android ROM. You can even pay for a phone with those things already set up. Like it or not, people want convenience.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I mean, we have that: Android has plenty of alternative ROMs, many of which have Google services removed or otherwise sandboxed. But, overwhelmingly, people (myself included) do not choose to take this route, because they are much less user-friendly, and you lose functionality. Regarding "firewalling location API access", that's something that you get for default on both Android and iOS, no? Granted, there's no guarantee Google and Apple themselves are respecting those settings on their own platforms.
  - nixpulvis 4y ago
    What I'm trying to say is that there should be significant pressure on companies like Apple and Google to take their successful and user friendly platforms and open them up so we can implement the functions we want without opting to replace the whole thing (rooted or jailbroken) ROMs.
    - lern_too_spel 4y ago
      You can do that right now with Android without root, including Little Snitch functionality.
      - 4y ago
ramoz 4y ago
It's important everyone becomes educated about the fact that virtually every mobile app sells some part of your data that leads to some private company possessing the ability to draw a circle around your house on map and then detect all patterns of life without any PII. I don't think it's fair to pit this as a US gov't surveillance problem. It's true though - the Government missions involved, where this type of data is relevant, face rather compelling offerings especially in complex times; e.g. immigrant/refugee surges where understanding the flow of people up to the border is important for stability. All of this data comes from Big/Small/all tech; usually branded as "ad tech" or "mobility data". And the supply chain is rather murky, masked, and rebranded/repackaged numerous times between a network of data providers & downstream businesses. Working close to Government... I've never seen any mission specifically seeking large-scale citizen-based tracking capabilities. US government in recent timeframes have seemed adamant about not purchasing any US-based location data & are cautious even for non-US based monitoring; especially as they learn more about the origins & scale of mobility data.
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago
  > virtually every mobile app Reminder to readers to use F-Droid
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  - sfmike 4y ago
    naive question, if you use f droid and you have location services on, use a bunch of social apps, have google maps on it, use it normally, what extra layer will f droid have with all of those leaks anyways?
    - Z_I_F_F 4y ago
      Also curious of this
    - kornhole 4y ago
      F-droid is an app store that carries only FOSS apps that do not have any Google API's. These apps are generally safe. Some may require your location such as maps to function. The difference with most of these mapping apps based on OSM.org is that they do not transmit your location anywhere. You can still install other proprietary location harvesting apps on your phone. If you do so, you are just minimizing the number of data harvesters. To ensure nobody but you knows where you are: 1. Have only safe apps installed. 2. An OS that does not send your location to Google, Apple, or others 3. Your SIM must not be transmitting to the Telco's. This means no SIM or airplane mode.
photochemsyn 4y ago
Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the main nodes where it put those fiber-optic cable splitters on the main trunk lines what, 20 years ago or so? Under the Patriot Act provisions, pushed through Congress in late October 2001 wasn't it? Just a few days after the Senate got shut down by those anthrax letter attacks sent to Daschle and Leahy (no, it wasn't Bruce Ivins). Then you've got the backdoors into Google and Apple, the whole PRISM thing... I doubt they've shut any of that down. See Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley" for more on that. https://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley https://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley It's not quite China yet, but I'm pretty sure that when our politicians and bureaucrats and their corporate masters look at China's system, their main emotion is one of envy.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS EC2's and opening the spigot to S3, so this type of thing would have taken some time. So the question is: did they pass a law to allow data collection because of 9/11 and other attacks, or did they pass a law because they wanted the NSA to be able to collect this data using computer systems they had been planning for years, and used those attacks as a pretext?
  - lstodd 4y ago
    Remember the Clipper chip from 1993? It's not like they suddenly started it in 2001.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    I legit don't believe they can store all that data. Youtube alone creates too much data for them to process and handle. They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.
lrvick 4y ago
Among the many reasons I choose not to own a cell phone.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  Which just means you are tracked differently. You are an Outlier instead of Average Joe making Average Data.
  - vaylian 4y ago
    how?
    - BizarroLand 4y ago
      Credit card usage tied to a non-cell phone user. There are layers of patterns to watch and the best invisibility you can have is to blend in, which is scary, worrying, and terrifying because the powers that be would prefer to have a citizenry of crabs in a bucket rather than half a billion free-roaming cats to corral. It makes their job a little bit easier and that's all that matters to them.
      - lrvick 4y ago
        I am well aware of this which is why I only use cash and cash-purchased disposable prepaid debit cards IRL.
- ProllyInfamous 4y ago
  There are DOZENS of us! ---- As a fellow non-mobile phone user, my life has drastically improved. There are many (MANY!) acquaintances whom this frustrates immensely (for they cannot instantaneously speak with me), but my inner circle all know how to reach me by pager a/o physically visiting. As for my outer circle... good riddance (FWIW I am retired)!
  - lrvick 4y ago
flerchin 4y ago
If I have no choice about the ubiquitous surveillance, I'd at least like some positives like stopping the school shootings. As it is, they're watching, but clearly not doing anything useful.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  Let's avoid giving them an acceptable reason to lock up anyone they want because they claim they're going to commit a crime.
  - SamuelAdams 4y ago
    Minority Report was supposed to be fictional, not a documentary.
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atlas_shrugged 4y ago
I wish the apple privacy team would address this, otherwise what good are their privacy claims
- cj 4y ago
  Apple launched Private Relay in beta which is essentially a VPN (I believe).
  - pretext-1 4y ago
    Unfortunately only works in Safari and Mail. I wish they would make it work system-wide (like a real VPN).
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  Depends on your threat model. I don't include state actors in mine, they can employ $5 hammers just as easily as crypto breakers
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    you’re fine with state actors being able to precisely target propaganda / inciting calls to violence based on psychological profiles etc, including your neighbors
    - sodality2 4y ago
      Not that they are fine, probably they just have no avenue to defend against that. It would be like an ant declaring war on the elephant.
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        Or maybe like a nest of hornets declaring war on a person
        4y ago
crikeyjoe 4y ago
matrix12 4y ago
Or just go after the data brokers. It's a pot of honey that the USG and others will get. Secret executive order or otherwise.
typeofhuman 4y ago
It's safe to say we're all being tracked 24/7. Can you believe millions of people are wearing biometric scanners connected to the internet on their body all day and night! To the people who remember, we've lost our way.
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- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Not having any trust your government will somewhat do the right thing for its people must be such mental burden. The world before cell phones was also one where people movement was incredibly easy to anticipate, a vast amount of people would have never traveled farther than a few gours by car from their birth place, buying online was an outlier and news sources could all be fully controled. That wasn't some eden where a government had no idea what the average people would be doing or thinking or had a hard time controling.
kfrzcode 4y ago
> new Best OPSEC assumes that Five+4Eyes have had all of the data, deanonymized, since 2013. Thanks NSA!
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kfrzcode 4y ago
There's clearly a market for the ExpressVPN types to market a packet sniffer that identifies who's getting what data, and potentially shut it down. Allow lists. etc. The tech isn't new, but it's not accessible to your average data-well a.k.a. end user, and risks breaking functionality....
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  So long as you have deep control of inbound and outbound peers you can deanonymize traffic by throttling one end and finding streams that are affected. The service providers selling faux security don't have to be involved.
specialist 4y ago
Every person, living and dead, has been uniquely identified and is tracked in near real time. Source: I read the news, don't suffer from amnesia or willful ignorance. We used Seisent (since bought by LexisNexus) in the mid-aughts. At the time, every person in North America was accounted for, with pretty good coverage of the Caribbean and Central America. The NSA bought a few clusters, then wove in their own datasets (phone use, location tracking, credit cards, library usage, email, etc). There are many entities maintaining all encompassing panopticonic demographic databases. Governments and publicly traded companies. This is not refutable. Ironically, in the USA, both voter registration and gun ownership are explicitly excluded. Because reasons. (You can't manage what you don't measure.) We could, trivially, resolve all the policy food fights over vote registration "fraud", gun ownership, and conducting the consensus. Turn all those flash points into simple database queries. We could, trivially, outright stop all anonymous trolling and disinformation. Purveyors of social media don't authenticate their users because they don't want to. Their business models require that they remain willfully ignorant.
- WebbWeaver 4y ago
  All great points. >We could, trivially, outright stop all anonymous trolling and disinformation. Purveyors of social media don't authenticate their users because they don't want to. Their business models require that they remain willfully ignorant. Yes well what argument would you make, if you could or would, to change the current landscape?
  - specialist 4y ago
    Since you asked... Social (popular) medias all eventually implode. Lifecycle maturity models and all that. Seems to me that Facebook and Twitter are well into the top of their S-curves. (I can't speak to TikTok.) If I wanted to accelerate their demise, I'd attack their revenue. Like pop the digital advertising bubble. Congressional and criminal investigations into digital ad fraud would mosdef do the trick. -- If we could go back in time, perhaps lessons for whatever comes next, I'd advocate three general categories of reforms. 1) All the "well duh" stuff that Sen Mark Warner et al advocate. Here's the PR for SAFE TECH Act and Warner's white paper. https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner-hirono-klobuchar-announce-the-safe-tech-act-to-reform-section-230 https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner... https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d/3/d32c2f17-cc76-4e11-8aa9-897eb3c90d16/65A7C5D983F899DAAE5AA21F57BAD944.social-media-regulation-proposals.pdf https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d/3/d32c2f... And a layperson's summary: https://diginomica.com/sen-mark-warners-15-common-sense-rules-for-social-media-platforms https://diginomica.com/sen-mark-warners-15-common-sense-rule... I particularly like clearly identifying bots. Some are authentic, legit activity. So not an outright ban of bots. "Media literacy" is quixotic; I guess they want to say they tried. I want to know more about "information fiduciaries"; see #3 below. 2) Nerf the algorithms, squelching instead of boosting viral content. Addressed by section 1.4 of this commission's recommendations. (Which also has a lot of "well duh" general purpose civil society stuff.) https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083 https://informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ForumID_Report-on-infodemics_101120.pdf https://informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/... 3) Most radically: Individual property rights over personal data. My data is me. If someone is using my data in some economic way, I want my cut. This nicely dovetails (necessitates) the misc proposals of treating aggregated data as a liability, instead of as an asset. Which would totally flip the current script for investors, regulators, insurers, etc. I've tried to understand the opposition to "personal data sovereignty" -- just came up with that, clever!, because I don't know what else to call it. I dimly recall some "privacy experts" in California concern trolling that state's initiatives. I think their reasoning was something like "we can't put a price on personal data because that'd encourage more collection". Um. Okay. Felt very cassandra, unattached to our reality. So a philosophical rather than a practical opposition, I suppose. FWIW, talking about this stuff is really hard. My "pay me for using my data" proposal doesn't make sense unless the audience already understands the current ecosystem. As I've said elsewhere, I worked on electronic medical records information exchanges. Our startup was bought by a national laboratory (Quest Diagnostics). I sat in various meetings and calls, with PHBs, lawyers, and other goons, brainstorming ways to further monetize medical records. Back in the mid-aughts, every single participant (doctors, hospitals, labs, scripts, insurers, pharma) absolutely considered patient data as "theirs". And our potential partners like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault and Cerner and EPIC were all hellbound in trying to figure out how to monetize it. It was absolutely disgusting.
fundad 4y ago
Can they tell us what members of our corporate security departments participated in Jan At this point we know our employers know but are covering it up so as not to anger RWers. We don't even know if insurrectionists were purged from corporate security departments or if the rest of the department has been vetted extra. All we know is our employers want us back into the office to serve as their human shields.
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dang 4y ago
Url changed from https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/18/homeland-security-cell-phone-tracking/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/18/homeland-security-cell-pho..., which points to this.
nr2x 4y ago
The Feds have been buying consumer data for decades, this is far from new. This goes back to “junk mail”, pre internet. As usual the US congress sat by and did nothing, and in all likelihood, will continue to do nothing.
- jdp23 4y ago
  Agreed that this has been going on for years and Congress has done nothing to date. But ... The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, sponsored by Senators Wyden and Paul, has a hearing tomorrow morning -- and may actually have decent chance to pass Congress this session. If you're in the US, EFF's "Tell Congress: The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale" page has a web form to encourage your representatives to support the bill. https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-the-fourth-amendment-is-not-for-sale https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-the-fourth-amendmen...
  - nr2x 4y ago
    I’ve just given up on the federal government. It stopped working for common people in any meaningful way a long time ago. State and local, sure, but federal? Why bother.
    - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
      State is a longshot, depending on where you live and if your interests align with those in power. Being queer in a conservative area isn't going to get you results that keep you safe, and it is worse if your particular brand of queer is being trans. Transfolks aren't getting treated well from some state governments. Local? There is a serious lack of power that local politicians wield and most won't be able to help you with your issues.
    - 616c 4y ago
      It is what you put into it? I won't get into detail but it is hard and thankless. Writing off all the public sector in the US is writing off the private sector BC of bad actors like the data marketers. Should we write them off entirely?
ed-209 4y ago
What's the name of the phenomena wherein people who once mocked the idea of this occuring now act as if it's obvious and unremarkable?
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quantum_state 4y ago
This should not be surprising at all ... hope we still remember the Snowden revelation ....
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zaptheimpaler 4y ago
No one cares. This kind of surveillance and massive overreach by intelligence agencies has been reported dozens of times for at least 20 years now. The most recent example i remember was of facial recognition in airports. Media reported it, some people whined about it, oh maybe the people will demand privacy? lol. Now its standard procedure. Delta even does boarding based on facial ID by default. "Raising awareness" does nothing. Commenting on online forums does nothing. The government is in control in every way, of the markets and hence jobs/unemployment, of privacy and surveillance. We've all become excellent at reporting and following bad news even while being completely incapable of effecting any change. The median person is too poor or dumb or disempowered for this to even crack the top 10 issues. They're complaining about gas prices and rent instead. We choose between 2 geriatric clowns who can't possibly keep up with what 100,0000 government employees are doing every 4 years and a congress that can't pass a law to save its life. Democracy is working super well lol.
- hunterb123 4y ago
  Please don't speak for everyone. I care. Many people care. You may feel as though the median person is too poor or dumb or disempowered, and that may disempower you, but there are many other people who tirelessly work against these types of overreaches, whether its' FOIA requests, campaigns, articles, or otherwise. I see no point in such a post, it drifted into some sort of anti-democracy rant.
  - user3939382 4y ago
    I feel that the entire machinery of the government at the state and Federal levels is so thoroughly captured and corrupt that its levers can now never be used to cleanse itself. The American people have/had rights they didn’t have to sacrifice to get, but which are valuable to a very determined and well-organized group of people, and so they are and will evaporate. The average American has never even heard of Snowden.
  - zaptheimpaler 4y ago
    Sorry about the drift into a rant. My point is to say that the standard playbook for creating social or policy change is broken. The playbook is roughly - 1. build awareness via a nice article like the link 2. people read it? 3. people do something about it? But very few people read. The actual issues in broad public awareness are whatever crap is on Fox news. Beyond that, even if people get mad they have no structured way to demand a change and it rarely happens. The rant is tangentially related because we still haven't seen any action on the Uvalde PD, abortion laws just got revoked, there is a war in Ukraine, we might soon be in a recession, the climate might kill us all, etc etc. These are issues where the public actually cares, but nothing seems to change. Surveillance is not even on the list with all the other fires burning. I guess I'm just saying "caring" about an issue is meaningless in the absence of the power to effect any change. We dont even have the basic ability to ask a government official a question and get a straight answer. We don't seem to have any common knowledge or consensus on how to demand accountability from the government. These are much deeper issues that have to somehow be addressed before anything happens.
tho23u4o23i4 4y ago
claytongulick 4y ago
I'm starting to think that it's time to make an open source and open-data platform for this. Similar in scope to OSM, but for all people. The goal of the project would be to reveal to the average person how much data is being collected about them, and how easy it is - with the end goal being to influence legislation to curb these practices. As long as it remains in the shadows, it doesn't really affect the average person, and the convenience of digital devices will outweigh the privacy concerns.
- marklockettau 4y ago
  You should do this
  - claytongulick 4y ago
    I very well may.
- salawat 4y ago
  ...Sounds like chucking TNT into a bonfire tbqh, and unfortunately, you can't unring that bell.
- kornhole 4y ago
  Many of these harvesters offer data dumps to their products/users as required by California and other laws. They are quite eye opening. However few people ask for it. It may be willful ignorance. So even if you create this, many people won't want to see it and prefer to go on using their coveted brand of phone and apps. You would need to force them to look at it. See the fight scene in They Live.
- badreg 4y ago
  I may be interested in helping with this, if needed.
- serial_dev 4y ago
  Let's assume you make a platform like that. What prevents it from becoming just another surveillance platform?
NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
Fellow humans, there are alternatives to being tracked via cell phone! Your neck need not be under anyone's boot! You don't even need to give up any functionality: Data service: The simplest thing is to buy a prepaid SIM and top it off with cash. The lovely people over at /r/nocontract maintain a big spreadsheet so you can filter by various properties of the available contracts. Another way to go is to pay for a postpaid plan with a virtual credit card (e.g., privacy.com). It won't be linked to your name at the telco, but of course privacy.com knows who you are. Yet a third way to go, which is nascent, is buy an eSIM with crypto. All these methods make you /pseudo/nymous, but obviously you're still identifiable by subscriber number and possibly IMEI, to put aside correlational things like your traffic profile. You can help this problem by routing everything through a VPN. Then you're pseudonymous but the cell carrier knows nothing about you other than that you use a VPN. Pay for the VPN with crypto. Of course now the VPN provider knows your traffic, but you're much more anonymous to them than you are to a telco. You make your choices. Defense in depth. Etc. OS: CalyxOS: https://calyxos.org/ https://calyxos.org/ Privacy-respecting Android distribution that replaces Google spyware with MicroG, so you can have your cake and eat it too. Most everything will work as you're used to, but it does still talk to Google to make that happen. GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/ https://grapheneos.org/ Very much like Calyx, but extra-hardened and with no MicroG. No involvement with Google at all by default. You can use the work profile thinger in Android to set up an environment where you can run unprivileged Play services + whatever crapware you need that requires them. LineageOS: https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/ The successor to CyanogenMod, will work with many different phones. More privacy and control than stock Android. There are also many others: Sailfish, Replicant, e Hardware: CalyxOS and GrapheneOS run best on Pixel 3, 3a, 3XL, 4, 4a, 4XL, 5, 6, 6a. The path of least resistance is to get one of these phones and run CalyxOS (if there is an app you need to use that needs Google services like Firebase Cloud Messaging...note that many that can use FCM will run fine without), otherwise run GrapheneOS. You can also buy a Librem 5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ If privacy and security and hacking are really important to you. Or a pinephone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
- gscott 4y ago
  AT&T is able to tell when you activate your prepaid phone what other phones are nearby. Drug dealers have been unmasked using this. They thought they did everything right but someone had a normal phone plan near their phone as it was activated and then the pre-paid phones were around those with regular plan phones. Unmasking the whole group. The best way is buy the prepaid phone from a 7/11 type store. Wait 6 months, go to the mountains in an old non-trackable car, leave your normal cellphone behind. Activate the prepaid phone. Put the pre-paid phone in a chip bag. Hand off the phone to the person who is going to use it but they put their phone in a chip bag before using the pre-paid one. Always protect your normal phone so it doesn't unmask your "secure" phone.
lettergram 4y ago
When Google and apple came out during the pandemic and showed the anonymous data on every city… it was pretty obvious they were prepared for that way too quickly. It’s safe to assume, you’re tracked 24/7 and everything’s recorded imo.
- MaxikCZ 4y ago
  > you’re tracked 24/7 and everything’s recorded imo If you have Android, open Google maps, open menu, select "Your Timeline", and scroll through days.
  - moonbas3 4y ago
    This can be disabled, although who knows if it's just hidden for you.
  - forestwisp 4y ago
    I did this and was greeted with a prompt explaining said functionality and asking if I wanted to "Turn it on". There was another button beneath it with the option to "Skip". I clicked Skip to see what happens and all location info for every day I checked was empty ("No visits for this day"). So looks like this functionality is disabled by default. I don't recall ever using google maps on my phone before, let alone tweaking specific settings.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Given that Apple and Google are both tech companies it was probably just a (say) python script to get that kind of thing going. For google especially the data and being able to iterate is how they keep their edge.
  - xnacly 4y ago
    Thats a really bad justification, if their edge depends on spying they shouldn’t exist
    - 4y ago
nicksiscoe 4y ago
I swear I’ve seen this article title a dozen times over the last dozen years
spongechameleon 4y ago
I'm more concerned that this data is available for sale in the first place. There should be a limit on the length of location history a telecom can collect for individual phone numbers and that data should never leave the telecom. We need stronger laws.
culi 4y ago
Sooo tl:dr; what IS the scale?
dogman144 4y ago
These are the engineers and PM types that have know this for years: - security engineering - privacy engineering - digital marketing - data science Maybe the first two did a vocal but bad job raising the flag due to how antagonistic some of that dialogue goes. But to this whole post acting surprised - look around at what you work on and who with, and what you’re paid for doing it. Be the change you want to see, but people in tech acting surprised about this seems extremely disingenuous.
- asjdflakjsdf 4y ago
  I absolutely hate when people respond to these kind of articles with "Why are people surprised". The truth is that no one is surprised. People are more disappointed, and frustrated, that this is allowed to happen, not just from a legal sense, but in a technical sense also.
  - dogman144 4y ago
    People are surprised in this thread. The truth is I run into engineers who are oblivious to this, perhaps deliberately so. Accountability for this starts with the teams building these products and choosing what to/to not include as data. Or; what I absolutely hate is engineers outside of privacy/security acting frustrated, while collecting checks on the back of this data. Like that group of ex-Facebook Trust and Safety that founded that ludicrous and smug user protection group in Boston based on their experiences at Facebook.
locallost 4y ago
I have nothing to hide from our Beloved Leader.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
trasz 4y ago
This is of course different from China, because in US you can vote against it. (People seriously believe this, lol.)
lizardactivist 4y ago
Surveillance state.
agilob 4y ago
Funny how this is right below: >FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores
- omginternets 4y ago
  Both can simultaneously be true.
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    There's a cliff between America spying on their citizens (to see trends and to catch criminals that make themselves statistically relevant) and China spying on Americans (to commit ideological subterfuge). Not that either are good, but given that some of the Chinese powers that be consider America to be an enemy the potential consequences are terrifying.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
No right to privacy in the Constitution and batshit insane Jesus freaks. May thy live in interesting times.
HeavyStorm 4y ago
I don't think we can avoid the surveillance Era
- consumer451 4y ago
  Not with that attitude! But seriously, at this point the best bet is to strive for accountability in governance both public and private.
pnw 4y ago
How does Apple’s removal of IDFA affect this? The ad companies no longer have a cross-app identifier that would be of any use in correlating data from a specific phone/person?
- juunpp 4y ago
  The phone company is still tracking your IMSI/IMEI, and they sell data too. The former is directly linked to your identity; the latter also trivially so for most people.
  - pnw 4y ago
    I understand there is a separate level of privacy issues caused by phone companies selling data, but all of the reports refer to data collected from apps which can't be IMSI/IMEI since that's not available from apps?
    - juunpp 4y ago
      Phone companies track you by virtue of your phone talking to cell towers, and they do sell your data. What OS or software you run on the phone is irrelevant. Recent versions of Android do not allow user-level applications to read the IMEI/IMSI as far as I know, but that was not always the case. And in any case, it doesn't prevent the carrier from tracking you. https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces... https://www.wired.com/story/carriers-sell-location-data-third-parties-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/story/carriers-sell-location-data-thir... https://www.ccmihub.com/blog/fcc-fines-mobile-providers-selling-real-time-customer-location-data https://www.ccmihub.com/blog/fcc-fines-mobile-providers-sell... https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/05/06/at-t-verizon-sprint-and-t-mobile-reportedly-sell-your-location-data/1118511001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/05/06/at-t-verizon-... https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-selling-your-location-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-sel...

I used to be skeptical of the skeptics, thought they were paranoid to worry about 'big tech' snooping and tracking our lives. Turns out it is not big tech but 'big govt' that I should've been worried about. We are in danger of turning into a surveillance state

Mo3 4y ago
Damn, even most of what we know is already a decade old information. I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligence agencies had much more crazy new projects going on the last few years. I also suspect there will be a point in the future where they’ll break encryption and we won’t find out until years later.. they already started looking into building a quantum computer in 2014, and I’d bet it’s not necessarily for morally acceptable research.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
  > I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligence agencies had much more crazy new projects going on the last few years. You mean like flying surveillance helicopters with really, really nice gear in them over major cities for days/weeks?
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    s/helicopters/planes
- gruez 4y ago
  >I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligence agencies had much more crazy new projects going on the last few years. except this isn't even from "the intelligence agencies", it's from data brokers: >The bulk of the data that CBP obtained came from its contract with Venntel, a location data broker that aggregates and sells information quietly siphoned from smartphone apps
  - Mo3 4y ago
    What I meant is, I wouldn't be surprised if the actual intelligence agencies themselves had much more crazy projects going on.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I suspect the intelligence agencies are still in absolute surprise that all their hard work was for nothing and everyone will happily tell Facebook, Google, et al everything with no prodding at all, and all they have to do is slurp it up.
api 4y ago
One thing I’d love to know is whether there is an upside and if so how much. How many kidnapping victims get found or violent plots foiled by this tech vs old school police work? Of course I suspect this info would be hard to get. Authorities would likely cook the books to make these things look more valuable than they really are.
- fsflover 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance#Purposes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance#Purposes
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Using it for kidnappings would draw attention to it, and remove the pretext for expanding it.
01100011 4y ago
We are a surveillance state. We(geeks) all made a fuss over it about 20 years ago and no one seemed to care so here we are. Every so often someone new realizes it, freaks out, and not much changes. I wish I weren't so cynical but at some point I just got tired of losing sleep over it.
- neilalexander 4y ago
  Making a fuss just isn’t enough when the majority of people still want the devices that are being used to spy on them.
- Retric 4y ago
  The difference is surveillance states have historically leveraged people rather than passive tracking. It’s wildly different knowing your friends, family, even children are being indoctrinated to report you for things that may or may not have happened at which point you just disappear like many people you never heard from again. It’s actively stressful in a way that cellphones just don’t evoke.
  - asdff 4y ago
    People with a bag of weed in their pocket in middle america probably feel the same way
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      - asdff 4y ago
        White or not if you are only middle class in middle america that ticket for the weed and steeper paraphernalia charge are going to hurt. Good luck getting the dumb things you've done as a teenager expunged unless you are actually upper class in middle america and therefore have access to legal council that your parents bankroll.
time_to_smile 4y ago
I've worked for the Federal Government and for a variety of ad-tech companies. I am still much more terrified of "big tech" (and small tech) than "big government". When I worked for the government I wanted to scrape some publicly available data from the web. Because the data involved information about people I had to write up a document explaining exactly what I was using the data for, exactly what information I would be collecting and why it was necessary, explain where the data was to be stored, and most importantly specify exactly how long I needed the data and when and how it would be safely removed. This had to be approved by a privacy officer. I was shocked, because this is data that I, as a private citizen, could easily scrape. I asked why I had to do something so involved for a project I could easily do in my spare time. The answer I got was this: Because the government has extra authority they also have extra responsibility. As government employees we have more power to impact people's lives so it is our responsibility to be very explicit is what we do and why we are doing in. In ad-tech there are oceans of data that are not publicly available, and in the US virtually zero restriction who looks at that data and what they can do with it. I've watched people move around town via trackers when the use they web, seen where they got coffee and seen which doctor they go to. I used this information to demonstrate to the legal team at previous company to care about user privacy. They were shocked but in the end made no real policy decision. Some of the big players likely have tighter security but only for business/PR reasons. I can assure you that a random data engineer at a mid-sized tech company has far more access to your personal secrets than an FBI agent. Don't get me wrong, there are agencies in the government that have more surveillance power than they should and it is ripe for abuse. But don't think "it's not big tech", especially since there is a ultimately a thin line between big tech and big govt.
- yupper32 4y ago
  > Because the data involved information about people I had to write up a document explaining exactly what I was using the data for, exactly what information I would be collecting and why it was necessary, explain where the data was to be stored, and most importantly specify exactly how long I needed the data and when and how it would be safely removed. This just sounds like a design doc, which I do regardless of if it has to get reviewed by a privacy team or I'm doing anything sensitive. Maybe it's because I've worked for mostly google & ex-googler run companies, but this is just standard practice for me.
slackfan 4y ago
To quote the late Steve Jobs: "Government is the biggest monopoly of them all". Considering most data collection firms will happily sell to the feds, it's really not that much of a difference in the end.
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freeAgent 4y ago
I think it's becoming increasingly apparent that there's not much difference between "Big Tech" and "Big Government." As this article makes clear, they have a symbiotic relationship with each other. Big Tech makes money from Big Government, which uses Big Tech to get around restrictions on what it's allowed to do on its own.
- Smoosh 4y ago
  The trouble with big-everything is that they are indeed the big players, and therefore heavily invested in the status quo, and are the ones with power and influence. They don't want to fix things we see as problems, because they're doing just fine thank you. Another instance of "Fuck you, I've got mine".
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_moof 4y ago
por qué no los dos dot gif, my friend.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
They're the same people.

tomohawk 4y ago

When it came out that government was looking at all of the data on the internet, there was a massive effort to move to https. Everyone got involved. Why can't these same companies and organizations push for phones to be anonymous? Why should a 'phone' be primarily a person tracker that happens to have voice communications built in?

gruez 4y ago
It's literally not possible because the mobile network needs to know where your phone is so it can route packets to the tower that you're connected.
- tomohawk 4y ago
  But it doesn't need to know who you are. The whole problem is that a person's identity is more and more entangled with a tracking device.
  - gruez 4y ago
    In that case you can just get a burner phone + data SIM, and route all your calls/texts via VOIP provider.
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      I saw a post a few months ago where an actual mobile security expert publicly said they did not have very high confidence in their own ability to cleanly buy and use a burner if the stakes were high eg government actively trying to build a case against them. Since then I've been very skeptical of all claims of what you can "just" do to avoid being tracked. This problem can't be solved by individual action or paranoia it's too big and complex now.
      - gruez 4y ago
        >an actual mobile security expert publicly said they did not have very high confidence in their own ability to cleanly buy and use a burner if the stakes were high eg government actively trying to build a case against them. I'm not sure what the threat model here is. If the "government actively trying to build a case against them" involves government agents following you in unmarked vans, then the government being able to track you through your SIM should be the least of your worries. If you're merely on some government watchlist (ie. there aren't agents following you), I don't see how it would be hard to cleanly buy a burner phone/sim, especially in the post pandemic age where face masks are socially acceptable.

sva_ 4y ago

I wonder why are we so complacent with these kind of things? Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full, and live in climate-controlled homes? Or has there been some degeneration of the human body brought upon us with all kinds of new artificial materials we use, that might affect our bodies in ways we can't yet comprehend; or is it a psychological thing based on the results of technological achievements we consume? Looking back at some of the European revolutions, it doesn't seem like so much is missing to cause an urge to revolt in people. So what is different? Why do we repeatedly allow this to happen?

bwestergard 4y ago
"Is it really just the fact that we got our bellies full" Among sociologists and political theorists, this is known as an "embourgeoisement thesis". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embourgeoisement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embourgeoisement
- lioeters 4y ago
  Today I learned, thanks for a new word. And its opposite: "proletarianization".
asdff 4y ago
I think the problems affecting the system are just too widespread and bespoke for the individual to resolve. To actually understand fully the scope of tracking etc, you probably need to be qualified to be a computer engineer or someone with a similar resume. That limits the amount of the population that is even capable of comprehending the news to a small sliver. Extend that to any field: biology, law, physics, economics, etc. Popular science reporting is terrible because the writers and the readers both lack sufficient debth to put things in context. Earnest law reporting is going to take a law degree as well as a stack of books to put things in their actual context. Economics is even worse; they say a grand unifying theory of economics is impossible because of the time it takes to study all its various schools of economic theory means it cannot be done in a single human lifetime. The great danger of having the knowledge of all things in our society be limited to a handful of siloed specialists is that it leaves a lot of room for placing opinion, biased, or slanted reporting to the same weight as the actual facts, since no one is qualified to see what is true and what isn't. It allows people who have no experience on a given issue to be in control of its outcomes, which invites graft sooner than learned experience.

g8oz 4y ago

I'm wondering when citizen vigilante groups will start buying location data from these brokers to solve crimes.

corrral 4y ago
Or foreign governments or corporations (think: taking down a competitor or extorting business favors) for blackmail purposes.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Who says they don’t?
encryptluks2 4y ago
More like malicious criminal organizations that want to ensure you pay off your gambling debts
kelnos 4y ago
I'm surprised no one has bought location data for prominent Congresspersons and used it to embarrass them into writing up laws around this.
- ccvannorman 4y ago
  They have. John Oliver did it this year, and it was f*king great! https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/last-week-tonight-john-oliver-recap-season-9-episode-7-congress-data-1335598/ https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/last-we...
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nixpulvis 4y ago

We need to demand more options on technology platforms! We cannot impose effective consumer pressure when we are forced to choose between two locked down App Stores which make it impossible to categorically prevent these kinds of malicious actions. How long do you think it would take for a "Little Snitch"-like application to pop up that firewalls location API access if the platforms were more open?

HKH2 4y ago
We clearly have options. On an Android phone, you can install F-Droid, and you can flash a custom Android ROM. You can even pay for a phone with those things already set up. Like it or not, people want convenience.
kelnos 4y ago
I mean, we have that: Android has plenty of alternative ROMs, many of which have Google services removed or otherwise sandboxed. But, overwhelmingly, people (myself included) do not choose to take this route, because they are much less user-friendly, and you lose functionality. Regarding "firewalling location API access", that's something that you get for default on both Android and iOS, no? Granted, there's no guarantee Google and Apple themselves are respecting those settings on their own platforms.
- nixpulvis 4y ago
  What I'm trying to say is that there should be significant pressure on companies like Apple and Google to take their successful and user friendly platforms and open them up so we can implement the functions we want without opting to replace the whole thing (rooted or jailbroken) ROMs.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    You can do that right now with Android without root, including Little Snitch functionality.
    - 4y ago

ramoz 4y ago

It's important everyone becomes educated about the fact that virtually every mobile app sells some part of your data that leads to some private company possessing the ability to draw a circle around your house on map and then detect all patterns of life without any PII. I don't think it's fair to pit this as a US gov't surveillance problem. It's true though - the Government missions involved, where this type of data is relevant, face rather compelling offerings especially in complex times; e.g. immigrant/refugee surges where understanding the flow of people up to the border is important for stability. All of this data comes from Big/Small/all tech; usually branded as "ad tech" or "mobility data". And the supply chain is rather murky, masked, and rebranded/repackaged numerous times between a network of data providers & downstream businesses. Working close to Government... I've never seen any mission specifically seeking large-scale citizen-based tracking capabilities. US government in recent timeframes have seemed adamant about not purchasing any US-based location data & are cautious even for non-US based monitoring; especially as they learn more about the origins & scale of mobility data.

ReactiveJelly 4y ago
> virtually every mobile app Reminder to readers to use F-Droid
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sfmike 4y ago
  naive question, if you use f droid and you have location services on, use a bunch of social apps, have google maps on it, use it normally, what extra layer will f droid have with all of those leaks anyways?
  - Z_I_F_F 4y ago
    Also curious of this
  - kornhole 4y ago
    F-droid is an app store that carries only FOSS apps that do not have any Google API's. These apps are generally safe. Some may require your location such as maps to function. The difference with most of these mapping apps based on OSM.org is that they do not transmit your location anywhere. You can still install other proprietary location harvesting apps on your phone. If you do so, you are just minimizing the number of data harvesters. To ensure nobody but you knows where you are: 1. Have only safe apps installed. 2. An OS that does not send your location to Google, Apple, or others 3. Your SIM must not be transmitting to the Telco's. This means no SIM or airplane mode.

photochemsyn 4y ago

Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the main nodes where it put those fiber-optic cable splitters on the main trunk lines what, 20 years ago or so? Under the Patriot Act provisions, pushed through Congress in late October 2001 wasn't it? Just a few days after the Senate got shut down by those anthrax letter attacks sent to Daschle and Leahy (no, it wasn't Bruce Ivins). Then you've got the backdoors into Google and Apple, the whole PRISM thing... I doubt they've shut any of that down. See Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley" for more on that. https://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley https://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley It's not quite China yet, but I'm pretty sure that when our politicians and bureaucrats and their corporate masters look at China's system, their main emotion is one of envy.

ok_dad 4y ago
Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS EC2's and opening the spigot to S3, so this type of thing would have taken some time. So the question is: did they pass a law to allow data collection because of 9/11 and other attacks, or did they pass a law because they wanted the NSA to be able to collect this data using computer systems they had been planning for years, and used those attacks as a pretext?
- lstodd 4y ago
  Remember the Clipper chip from 1993? It's not like they suddenly started it in 2001.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  I legit don't believe they can store all that data. Youtube alone creates too much data for them to process and handle. They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.

lrvick 4y ago

Among the many reasons I choose not to own a cell phone.

Broken_Hippo 4y ago
Which just means you are tracked differently. You are an Outlier instead of Average Joe making Average Data.
- vaylian 4y ago
  how?
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    Credit card usage tied to a non-cell phone user. There are layers of patterns to watch and the best invisibility you can have is to blend in, which is scary, worrying, and terrifying because the powers that be would prefer to have a citizenry of crabs in a bucket rather than half a billion free-roaming cats to corral. It makes their job a little bit easier and that's all that matters to them.
    - lrvick 4y ago
      I am well aware of this which is why I only use cash and cash-purchased disposable prepaid debit cards IRL.
ProllyInfamous 4y ago
There are DOZENS of us! ---- As a fellow non-mobile phone user, my life has drastically improved. There are many (MANY!) acquaintances whom this frustrates immensely (for they cannot instantaneously speak with me), but my inner circle all know how to reach me by pager a/o physically visiting. As for my outer circle... good riddance (FWIW I am retired)!
- lrvick 4y ago

flerchin 4y ago

If I have no choice about the ubiquitous surveillance, I'd at least like some positives like stopping the school shootings. As it is, they're watching, but clearly not doing anything useful.

boomboomsubban 4y ago
Let's avoid giving them an acceptable reason to lock up anyone they want because they claim they're going to commit a crime.
- SamuelAdams 4y ago
  Minority Report was supposed to be fictional, not a documentary.
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atlas_shrugged 4y ago

I wish the apple privacy team would address this, otherwise what good are their privacy claims

cj 4y ago
Apple launched Private Relay in beta which is essentially a VPN (I believe).
- pretext-1 4y ago
  Unfortunately only works in Safari and Mail. I wish they would make it work system-wide (like a real VPN).
calvinmorrison 4y ago
Depends on your threat model. I don't include state actors in mine, they can employ $5 hammers just as easily as crypto breakers
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  you’re fine with state actors being able to precisely target propaganda / inciting calls to violence based on psychological profiles etc, including your neighbors
  - sodality2 4y ago
    Not that they are fine, probably they just have no avenue to defend against that. It would be like an ant declaring war on the elephant.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Or maybe like a nest of hornets declaring war on a person
      - 4y ago

crikeyjoe 4y ago

matrix12 4y ago

Or just go after the data brokers. It's a pot of honey that the USG and others will get. Secret executive order or otherwise.

typeofhuman 4y ago

It's safe to say we're all being tracked 24/7. Can you believe millions of people are wearing biometric scanners connected to the internet on their body all day and night! To the people who remember, we've lost our way.

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makeitdouble 4y ago
Not having any trust your government will somewhat do the right thing for its people must be such mental burden. The world before cell phones was also one where people movement was incredibly easy to anticipate, a vast amount of people would have never traveled farther than a few gours by car from their birth place, buying online was an outlier and news sources could all be fully controled. That wasn't some eden where a government had no idea what the average people would be doing or thinking or had a hard time controling.

kfrzcode 4y ago

> new Best OPSEC assumes that Five+4Eyes have had all of the data, deanonymized, since 2013. Thanks NSA!

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kfrzcode 4y ago

There's clearly a market for the ExpressVPN types to market a packet sniffer that identifies who's getting what data, and potentially shut it down. Allow lists. etc. The tech isn't new, but it's not accessible to your average data-well a.k.a. end user, and risks breaking functionality....

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
So long as you have deep control of inbound and outbound peers you can deanonymize traffic by throttling one end and finding streams that are affected. The service providers selling faux security don't have to be involved.

specialist 4y ago

Every person, living and dead, has been uniquely identified and is tracked in near real time. Source: I read the news, don't suffer from amnesia or willful ignorance. We used Seisent (since bought by LexisNexus) in the mid-aughts. At the time, every person in North America was accounted for, with pretty good coverage of the Caribbean and Central America. The NSA bought a few clusters, then wove in their own datasets (phone use, location tracking, credit cards, library usage, email, etc). There are many entities maintaining all encompassing panopticonic demographic databases. Governments and publicly traded companies. This is not refutable. Ironically, in the USA, both voter registration and gun ownership are explicitly excluded. Because reasons. (You can't manage what you don't measure.) We could, trivially, resolve all the policy food fights over vote registration "fraud", gun ownership, and conducting the consensus. Turn all those flash points into simple database queries. We could, trivially, outright stop all anonymous trolling and disinformation. Purveyors of social media don't authenticate their users because they don't want to. Their business models require that they remain willfully ignorant.

WebbWeaver 4y ago
All great points. >We could, trivially, outright stop all anonymous trolling and disinformation. Purveyors of social media don't authenticate their users because they don't want to. Their business models require that they remain willfully ignorant. Yes well what argument would you make, if you could or would, to change the current landscape?
- specialist 4y ago
  Since you asked... Social (popular) medias all eventually implode. Lifecycle maturity models and all that. Seems to me that Facebook and Twitter are well into the top of their S-curves. (I can't speak to TikTok.) If I wanted to accelerate their demise, I'd attack their revenue. Like pop the digital advertising bubble. Congressional and criminal investigations into digital ad fraud would mosdef do the trick. -- If we could go back in time, perhaps lessons for whatever comes next, I'd advocate three general categories of reforms. 1) All the "well duh" stuff that Sen Mark Warner et al advocate. Here's the PR for SAFE TECH Act and Warner's white paper. https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner-hirono-klobuchar-announce-the-safe-tech-act-to-reform-section-230 https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner... https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d/3/d32c2f17-cc76-4e11-8aa9-897eb3c90d16/65A7C5D983F899DAAE5AA21F57BAD944.social-media-regulation-proposals.pdf https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/d/3/d32c2f... And a layperson's summary: https://diginomica.com/sen-mark-warners-15-common-sense-rules-for-social-media-platforms https://diginomica.com/sen-mark-warners-15-common-sense-rule... I particularly like clearly identifying bots. Some are authentic, legit activity. So not an outright ban of bots. "Media literacy" is quixotic; I guess they want to say they tried. I want to know more about "information fiduciaries"; see #3 below. 2) Nerf the algorithms, squelching instead of boosting viral content. Addressed by section 1.4 of this commission's recommendations. (Which also has a lot of "well duh" general purpose civil society stuff.) https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54901083 https://informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ForumID_Report-on-infodemics_101120.pdf https://informationdemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/... 3) Most radically: Individual property rights over personal data. My data is me. If someone is using my data in some economic way, I want my cut. This nicely dovetails (necessitates) the misc proposals of treating aggregated data as a liability, instead of as an asset. Which would totally flip the current script for investors, regulators, insurers, etc. I've tried to understand the opposition to "personal data sovereignty" -- just came up with that, clever!, because I don't know what else to call it. I dimly recall some "privacy experts" in California concern trolling that state's initiatives. I think their reasoning was something like "we can't put a price on personal data because that'd encourage more collection". Um. Okay. Felt very cassandra, unattached to our reality. So a philosophical rather than a practical opposition, I suppose. FWIW, talking about this stuff is really hard. My "pay me for using my data" proposal doesn't make sense unless the audience already understands the current ecosystem. As I've said elsewhere, I worked on electronic medical records information exchanges. Our startup was bought by a national laboratory (Quest Diagnostics). I sat in various meetings and calls, with PHBs, lawyers, and other goons, brainstorming ways to further monetize medical records. Back in the mid-aughts, every single participant (doctors, hospitals, labs, scripts, insurers, pharma) absolutely considered patient data as "theirs". And our potential partners like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault and Cerner and EPIC were all hellbound in trying to figure out how to monetize it. It was absolutely disgusting.

fundad 4y ago

Can they tell us what members of our corporate security departments participated in Jan At this point we know our employers know but are covering it up so as not to anger RWers. We don't even know if insurrectionists were purged from corporate security departments or if the rest of the department has been vetted extra. All we know is our employers want us back into the office to serve as their human shields.

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dang 4y ago

Url changed from https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/18/homeland-security-cell-phone-tracking/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/18/homeland-security-cell-pho..., which points to this.

nr2x 4y ago

The Feds have been buying consumer data for decades, this is far from new. This goes back to “junk mail”, pre internet. As usual the US congress sat by and did nothing, and in all likelihood, will continue to do nothing.

jdp23 4y ago
Agreed that this has been going on for years and Congress has done nothing to date. But ... The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, sponsored by Senators Wyden and Paul, has a hearing tomorrow morning -- and may actually have decent chance to pass Congress this session. If you're in the US, EFF's "Tell Congress: The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale" page has a web form to encourage your representatives to support the bill. https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-the-fourth-amendment-is-not-for-sale https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-the-fourth-amendmen...
- nr2x 4y ago
  I’ve just given up on the federal government. It stopped working for common people in any meaningful way a long time ago. State and local, sure, but federal? Why bother.
  - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    State is a longshot, depending on where you live and if your interests align with those in power. Being queer in a conservative area isn't going to get you results that keep you safe, and it is worse if your particular brand of queer is being trans. Transfolks aren't getting treated well from some state governments. Local? There is a serious lack of power that local politicians wield and most won't be able to help you with your issues.
  - 616c 4y ago
    It is what you put into it? I won't get into detail but it is hard and thankless. Writing off all the public sector in the US is writing off the private sector BC of bad actors like the data marketers. Should we write them off entirely?

ed-209 4y ago

What's the name of the phenomena wherein people who once mocked the idea of this occuring now act as if it's obvious and unremarkable?

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quantum_state 4y ago

This should not be surprising at all ... hope we still remember the Snowden revelation ....

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zaptheimpaler 4y ago

No one cares. This kind of surveillance and massive overreach by intelligence agencies has been reported dozens of times for at least 20 years now. The most recent example i remember was of facial recognition in airports. Media reported it, some people whined about it, oh maybe the people will demand privacy? lol. Now its standard procedure. Delta even does boarding based on facial ID by default. "Raising awareness" does nothing. Commenting on online forums does nothing. The government is in control in every way, of the markets and hence jobs/unemployment, of privacy and surveillance. We've all become excellent at reporting and following bad news even while being completely incapable of effecting any change. The median person is too poor or dumb or disempowered for this to even crack the top 10 issues. They're complaining about gas prices and rent instead. We choose between 2 geriatric clowns who can't possibly keep up with what 100,0000 government employees are doing every 4 years and a congress that can't pass a law to save its life. Democracy is working super well lol.

hunterb123 4y ago
Please don't speak for everyone. I care. Many people care. You may feel as though the median person is too poor or dumb or disempowered, and that may disempower you, but there are many other people who tirelessly work against these types of overreaches, whether its' FOIA requests, campaigns, articles, or otherwise. I see no point in such a post, it drifted into some sort of anti-democracy rant.
- user3939382 4y ago
  I feel that the entire machinery of the government at the state and Federal levels is so thoroughly captured and corrupt that its levers can now never be used to cleanse itself. The American people have/had rights they didn’t have to sacrifice to get, but which are valuable to a very determined and well-organized group of people, and so they are and will evaporate. The average American has never even heard of Snowden.
- zaptheimpaler 4y ago
  Sorry about the drift into a rant. My point is to say that the standard playbook for creating social or policy change is broken. The playbook is roughly - 1. build awareness via a nice article like the link 2. people read it? 3. people do something about it? But very few people read. The actual issues in broad public awareness are whatever crap is on Fox news. Beyond that, even if people get mad they have no structured way to demand a change and it rarely happens. The rant is tangentially related because we still haven't seen any action on the Uvalde PD, abortion laws just got revoked, there is a war in Ukraine, we might soon be in a recession, the climate might kill us all, etc etc. These are issues where the public actually cares, but nothing seems to change. Surveillance is not even on the list with all the other fires burning. I guess I'm just saying "caring" about an issue is meaningless in the absence of the power to effect any change. We dont even have the basic ability to ask a government official a question and get a straight answer. We don't seem to have any common knowledge or consensus on how to demand accountability from the government. These are much deeper issues that have to somehow be addressed before anything happens.

tho23u4o23i4 4y ago

claytongulick 4y ago

I'm starting to think that it's time to make an open source and open-data platform for this. Similar in scope to OSM, but for all people. The goal of the project would be to reveal to the average person how much data is being collected about them, and how easy it is - with the end goal being to influence legislation to curb these practices. As long as it remains in the shadows, it doesn't really affect the average person, and the convenience of digital devices will outweigh the privacy concerns.

marklockettau 4y ago
You should do this
- claytongulick 4y ago
  I very well may.
salawat 4y ago
...Sounds like chucking TNT into a bonfire tbqh, and unfortunately, you can't unring that bell.
kornhole 4y ago
Many of these harvesters offer data dumps to their products/users as required by California and other laws. They are quite eye opening. However few people ask for it. It may be willful ignorance. So even if you create this, many people won't want to see it and prefer to go on using their coveted brand of phone and apps. You would need to force them to look at it. See the fight scene in They Live.
badreg 4y ago
I may be interested in helping with this, if needed.
serial_dev 4y ago
Let's assume you make a platform like that. What prevents it from becoming just another surveillance platform?

NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago

Fellow humans, there are alternatives to being tracked via cell phone! Your neck need not be under anyone's boot! You don't even need to give up any functionality: Data service: The simplest thing is to buy a prepaid SIM and top it off with cash. The lovely people over at /r/nocontract maintain a big spreadsheet so you can filter by various properties of the available contracts. Another way to go is to pay for a postpaid plan with a virtual credit card (e.g., privacy.com). It won't be linked to your name at the telco, but of course privacy.com knows who you are. Yet a third way to go, which is nascent, is buy an eSIM with crypto. All these methods make you /pseudo/nymous, but obviously you're still identifiable by subscriber number and possibly IMEI, to put aside correlational things like your traffic profile. You can help this problem by routing everything through a VPN. Then you're pseudonymous but the cell carrier knows nothing about you other than that you use a VPN. Pay for the VPN with crypto. Of course now the VPN provider knows your traffic, but you're much more anonymous to them than you are to a telco. You make your choices. Defense in depth. Etc. OS: CalyxOS: https://calyxos.org/ https://calyxos.org/ Privacy-respecting Android distribution that replaces Google spyware with MicroG, so you can have your cake and eat it too. Most everything will work as you're used to, but it does still talk to Google to make that happen. GrapheneOS: https://grapheneos.org/ https://grapheneos.org/ Very much like Calyx, but extra-hardened and with no MicroG. No involvement with Google at all by default. You can use the work profile thinger in Android to set up an environment where you can run unprivileged Play services + whatever crapware you need that requires them. LineageOS: https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/ The successor to CyanogenMod, will work with many different phones. More privacy and control than stock Android. There are also many others: Sailfish, Replicant, e Hardware: CalyxOS and GrapheneOS run best on Pixel 3, 3a, 3XL, 4, 4a, 4XL, 5, 6, 6a. The path of least resistance is to get one of these phones and run CalyxOS (if there is an app you need to use that needs Google services like Firebase Cloud Messaging...note that many that can use FCM will run fine without), otherwise run GrapheneOS. You can also buy a Librem 5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ If privacy and security and hacking are really important to you. Or a pinephone: https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

gscott 4y ago
AT&T is able to tell when you activate your prepaid phone what other phones are nearby. Drug dealers have been unmasked using this. They thought they did everything right but someone had a normal phone plan near their phone as it was activated and then the pre-paid phones were around those with regular plan phones. Unmasking the whole group. The best way is buy the prepaid phone from a 7/11 type store. Wait 6 months, go to the mountains in an old non-trackable car, leave your normal cellphone behind. Activate the prepaid phone. Put the pre-paid phone in a chip bag. Hand off the phone to the person who is going to use it but they put their phone in a chip bag before using the pre-paid one. Always protect your normal phone so it doesn't unmask your "secure" phone.

lettergram 4y ago

When Google and apple came out during the pandemic and showed the anonymous data on every city… it was pretty obvious they were prepared for that way too quickly. It’s safe to assume, you’re tracked 24/7 and everything’s recorded imo.

MaxikCZ 4y ago
> you’re tracked 24/7 and everything’s recorded imo If you have Android, open Google maps, open menu, select "Your Timeline", and scroll through days.
- moonbas3 4y ago
  This can be disabled, although who knows if it's just hidden for you.
- forestwisp 4y ago
  I did this and was greeted with a prompt explaining said functionality and asking if I wanted to "Turn it on". There was another button beneath it with the option to "Skip". I clicked Skip to see what happens and all location info for every day I checked was empty ("No visits for this day"). So looks like this functionality is disabled by default. I don't recall ever using google maps on my phone before, let alone tweaking specific settings.
mhh__ 4y ago
Given that Apple and Google are both tech companies it was probably just a (say) python script to get that kind of thing going. For google especially the data and being able to iterate is how they keep their edge.
- xnacly 4y ago
  Thats a really bad justification, if their edge depends on spying they shouldn’t exist
  - 4y ago

nicksiscoe 4y ago

I swear I’ve seen this article title a dozen times over the last dozen years

spongechameleon 4y ago

I'm more concerned that this data is available for sale in the first place. There should be a limit on the length of location history a telecom can collect for individual phone numbers and that data should never leave the telecom. We need stronger laws.

culi 4y ago

Sooo tl:dr; what IS the scale?

dogman144 4y ago

These are the engineers and PM types that have know this for years: - security engineering - privacy engineering - digital marketing - data science Maybe the first two did a vocal but bad job raising the flag due to how antagonistic some of that dialogue goes. But to this whole post acting surprised - look around at what you work on and who with, and what you’re paid for doing it. Be the change you want to see, but people in tech acting surprised about this seems extremely disingenuous.

asjdflakjsdf 4y ago
I absolutely hate when people respond to these kind of articles with "Why are people surprised". The truth is that no one is surprised. People are more disappointed, and frustrated, that this is allowed to happen, not just from a legal sense, but in a technical sense also.
- dogman144 4y ago
  People are surprised in this thread. The truth is I run into engineers who are oblivious to this, perhaps deliberately so. Accountability for this starts with the teams building these products and choosing what to/to not include as data. Or; what I absolutely hate is engineers outside of privacy/security acting frustrated, while collecting checks on the back of this data. Like that group of ex-Facebook Trust and Safety that founded that ludicrous and smug user protection group in Boston based on their experiences at Facebook.

locallost 4y ago

I have nothing to hide from our Beloved Leader.

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trasz 4y ago

This is of course different from China, because in US you can vote against it. (People seriously believe this, lol.)

lizardactivist 4y ago

Surveillance state.

agilob 4y ago

Funny how this is right below: >FCC: TikTok is unacceptable security risk and should be removed from app stores

omginternets 4y ago
Both can simultaneously be true.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  There's a cliff between America spying on their citizens (to see trends and to catch criminals that make themselves statistically relevant) and China spying on Americans (to commit ideological subterfuge). Not that either are good, but given that some of the Chinese powers that be consider America to be an enemy the potential consequences are terrifying.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

No right to privacy in the Constitution and batshit insane Jesus freaks. May thy live in interesting times.

HeavyStorm 4y ago

I don't think we can avoid the surveillance Era

consumer451 4y ago
Not with that attitude! But seriously, at this point the best bet is to strive for accountability in governance both public and private.

pnw 4y ago

How does Apple’s removal of IDFA affect this? The ad companies no longer have a cross-app identifier that would be of any use in correlating data from a specific phone/person?

juunpp 4y ago
The phone company is still tracking your IMSI/IMEI, and they sell data too. The former is directly linked to your identity; the latter also trivially so for most people.
- pnw 4y ago
  I understand there is a separate level of privacy issues caused by phone companies selling data, but all of the reports refer to data collected from apps which can't be IMSI/IMEI since that's not available from apps?
  - juunpp 4y ago
    Phone companies track you by virtue of your phone talking to cell towers, and they do sell your data. What OS or software you run on the phone is irrelevant. Recent versions of Android do not allow user-level applications to read the IMEI/IMSI as far as I know, but that was not always the case. And in any case, it doesn't prevent the carrier from tracking you. https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-location-data/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces... https://www.wired.com/story/carriers-sell-location-data-third-parties-privacy/ https://www.wired.com/story/carriers-sell-location-data-thir... https://www.ccmihub.com/blog/fcc-fines-mobile-providers-selling-real-time-customer-location-data https://www.ccmihub.com/blog/fcc-fines-mobile-providers-sell... https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/05/06/at-t-verizon-sprint-and-t-mobile-reportedly-sell-your-location-data/1118511001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/05/06/at-t-verizon-... https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-selling-your-location-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/us-cell-carriers-still-sel...