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Adtech surveillance and government surveillance are often the same
- CAPSLOCKSSTUCK 3y agoI agree with the points raised by the article, but shouldn't there also be a push to stop cellular service providers from selling your location data? It's worthwhile to call out smartphone app developers, but ISPs can get your location even if you don't have a smartphone, and in fact are required to be able to report on this by law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_... etc.). Does the EFF just think that it's moot to try to legislate against the latter?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- daoboy 3y agoNot at all. The EFF does a lot of good work along those lines also. https://www.eff.org/issues/cell-tracking https://www.eff.org/issues/cell-tracking
- worik 3y ago> ...shouldn't there also be a push to stop cellular service providers from selling your location data? Yes There should be rules stopping the collection of that data There should be rules against locking down devices people "own" that prevent countermeasures Private use of this data is as worrying as government use. More so. States are often democratically accountable
- chaps 3y agoWe also have public records laws where we can hold gov agencies accountable to their abuse of, eg information. Doesn't really exist in private orgs, and it's one of the reasons gov agencies love third party vendors.
- j45 3y agoInteresting. Could the laws be changed without the population
- chaps 3y agoNot 100% sure what you mean, but yes we need something similar to GDPR which allows requests for our own information. It's a mostly a matter of legislative interest, which can stem from demands from the public.
- hedora 3y agoIn the US, with stuff like qualified immunity, having public access to records of crimes doesn’t allow anyone to be held accountable. Also, based on repeated leaks, our public records laws are completely inadequate. At least when an ad tech company gets caught breaking the law, they get fined a couple seconds of revenue, and there is a theoretical chance someone might get sent out for a few days of community service or probation.
- chaps 3y agoPreaching to the choir there! While public records laws stink, a lot of the work by orgs involved in transparency, and others have made it better. By no means is it going to be "good" anytime soon, but progress is certainly being made. Whether the work is being done fast enough is a different story, though I'll say that any amount of help makes a larger difference than it might seem. Just gotta be persistent. One of my proudest moments is (through reporting) getting the Chicago police department to admit they made an enormous mistake in their analysis, which a colleague says was the first time he's seen them admit to such a mistake in the years he's done this work. So there are signs that it's not all lost. Happy to chat about ways to contribute towards this work if you're interested. One thing I'll say about leaks is that they occasionally have the effect of revitalizing interest in these issues. But again, it takes persistence.
- j45 3y agoThe question may be too simple: Can the politicians already elected enact any laws they wish by their majority?
- hulitu 3y ago> States are often democratically accountable Maybe in a parallel universe. /s
- SoftTalker 3y agoAlso we need better education about the risks of carrying around an always-on GPS receiver that continually transmits your location to third parties. Victim-blaming? Maybe. But you can choose to turn your phone off.
- walterbell 3y agoHow many iPhone owners know their phones cannot be turned off, i.e. a faraday bag is required to stop radio transmission?
- SoftTalker 3y agoWhat transmission is still active when the phone is off?
- colinsane 3y agocan't say exactly, but the "find my" feature explicitly remains active even while "powered off" so it's evidently enough transmission that Apple can track location.
- SoftTalker 3y agoApparently this uses the phone NFC capability and other nearby active phones to determine location. So yes, either leave the phone at home if you don't want to be tracked, or use a faraday bag.
- LopovJack 3y agoThat is option that you need to turned on.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoBoth the UWB tracker and the NFC radio can be on even when the device is "off" (although there's settings to change that behavior). IIRC the baseband can potentially do all kinds of crazy stuff too (no evidence that iphones actually do anything unusual, but perhaps that could change if the government sent a very compelling court order)
- colinsane 3y ago> In the years since CALEA was passed it has been greatly expanded to include all VoIP and broadband Internet traffic. the article makes it sound like LE is freely able to tap any VoIP call. how would that work? i thought the usual setup for a VoIP call is SIP to ring the other party (which is partially secured), followed by ICE/STUN/TURN for the parties to find the most direct route between them, followed by the actual audio stream. do clients just not encrypt the audio stream? do carriers MITM everything downstream of that first SIP hop? (that would be inconsistent with the read-only probing suggested: “hardware taps or switch/router mirror-ports are employed to deliver copies of all of a network's data to dedicated IP probes.”).
- Nextgrid 3y ago> ICE/STUN/TURN for the parties to find the most direct route between them From my experience, using SIP to interact with the PSTN usually means your first point of entry into the PSTN also proxies the media. > do clients just not encrypt the audio stream? SIP encryption is very uncommon, and unless you use ZRTP (which is end-to-end), I believe any SIP server within the path mediates the key exchange and can thus capture the key or downgrade/disable the encryption. Given the above points, a packet capture on a switch port would give you both signalling and media traffic and is most likely how SIP lawful intercept is implemented.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jbmsf 3y agoI built one of the first location aggregation systems. Maybe the first, hard to be sure. My company had close relationships with all of the US cellular companies and built white label apps for them, mostly under the auspices of family safety (though many users were more concerned about the location of their partners than of their kids). Around the same time OAuth 1a came out and it seemed like a great ideal to offer a platform that leveraged these relationships to sell location to app developers, subject to consent and with a bunch of features to protect privacy. In the end, we had one app developer who was even remotely successful and the less privacy-focused aggregators partnered with the next generation of app developers and the product had no future. Nostalgia is fun.
- Podgajski 3y agoI that this is going to end much more badly than people realize. I mean it isn’t the definition of fascism when corporations collude with governments? So isn’t this what we’re seeing here?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smoldesu 3y agoI wouldn't say it's characteristically fascist, but your instinct that all this will end poorly is probably right. Ever since the Snowden leaks, we've known that multiple nations built up a digital power disparity that can stockpile exploits and apply them for petty purposes. NSO Group proved that it can be done practically silently, to any phone, with no extra software. Situations like the Canada/India murder probe also recently suggested that supposedly-secure channels can be intercepted anyways. One can only imagine what China or the NSA is fully capable of today. So far we've avoided catastrophe, but it does feel increasingly like the surveillance and internet control lines have already been drawn. I'd hear out anyone who wants to steelman a nicer interpretation of things, though!
- clubm8 3y ago[dead]
- ramesh31 3y ago>I that this is going to end much more badly than people realize. The state of web surveillance today will seem quaint compared to what's coming. Things like Quest 3 and Apple Vision are going to be just the beginning of it, but once everyone is walking around with AR devices, you will have no option of opting out of the point cloud. These companies will have a realtime graph of where and what everyone in public is doing at all times, even those who've never used any services. It's terrifying.
- clubm8 3y ago[dead]
- throw3121 3y agoSee also: the concept of AdInt, mentioned in https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/16/insanet_spyware/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/16/insanet_spyware/, more on its workings in the original investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz at https://archive.ph/7dbaV https://archive.ph/7dbaV (previously submitted with 2 comments only, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37542097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37542097)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- raarts 3y agoSomeone once said: "A democracy with advanced tech is less free than a dictatorship with primitive technology".
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Someone once said: "A democracy with advanced tech is less free than a dictatorship with primitive technology" Someone was an idiot. They should read about life in ancient Egypt, Inquisition-era Spain, Nazi Germany or the GDR, each of which was less technologically advanced than Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Estonia or Ireland today [1]. [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-index-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...
- amelius 3y agoIt can become true at some point, though.
- Ygg2 3y agoPossiblity for abuse is greater with greater tech. For all his purges Stalin never had ability to track and measure contents of your thoughts, we might not be there yet but a democracy with ability to detect and alter thoughts is way more sinister than all those mentioned. Imagine tomorrow's Holocausts but enjoyable, and then quickly forgotten.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoSure. That doesn’t invalidate democracy on the basis of technological advancement.
- Ygg2 3y agoWhat passes for democracy in practice is already quite tainted. Give it more technological power and results can be just as bad.
- shaycommacarli 3y agoMy personal data should not be “protected” or “regulated” by the FTC, then. The only legislation that would have any teeth would be a complete outlaw on all points of sale of personal user data without explicit consent of said user (i.e. cookies confirmation), but that will never happen. Also, if this is so blatant, why hasn’t there been a lawsuit yet? The U.S. government is already bound by the constitution and the 4th Amendment. I don’t think we need half assed legislation from people who don’t know what they’re doing
- newscracker 3y ago> Unless your data is fully encrypted or stored locally by you, the government often can get it from a communications or computing company. > Traditionally, that required a court order. But increasingly, the government just buys it from data brokers who bought it from the adtech industry. I presume the adtech industry includes Meta and Google. But some people (even here) get indignant and say “no, Meta doesn’t really sell your data” or “no, Google doesn’t really sell your data”. If these companies are participating in this ecosystem and buying from data brokers, they’re just as evil as the data brokers. Let’s not pretend that Meta and Google are saints who should not be criticized for making most of their money from these relationships and enabling surveillance.
- m463 3y agoWhat's been more annoying is that the government directly uses these services on their websites. for example dmv.ca.gov and irs.gov both use google throughout their site. Things break down when the government wants identity, or captcha or other things, and lets google be the solution.