9 ms·

Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way. Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crim

Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way. Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crime was committed? We all have. Well, your IEMI was included in a cell tower dump. Probably dozens of times. Did you happen to drive your car over any bridge in the Bay Area lately? Did a municipal vehicle pass you and catch your license plate with their ALPR camera? Guess what? Your name went through a database of an LEO search if they wanted to find a perp for that time/location. Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care. The Snowden files changed nothing. If there was ever a point in history where people would have given up their cell phones for their civil liberties, that would have been the time to do it.

skybrian 3y ago
This sounds scary, and yet I seem to be unharmed.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
  A case is criminal gangs buying from data brokers to scam elders
- sriram_malhar 3y ago
  Shall we wait on the laws until you personally come to some harm?
  - skybrian 3y ago
    No, but the argument did use "you" to imply that the reader was harmed. I consider that an illegitimate scare tactic. It would be better to talk about how someone else might be harmed.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      If you weren't one of the 30k watching the video, you are the "someone else".
- alt227 3y ago
  Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak out for me
godelski 3y ago
> Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way. I was mad then. I'm more mad now. Stop these arguments because it isn't like one implies the other. And who the fuck cares if someone wasn't but is now. What's the argument, that you're a hipster? That's not solving problems. I don't want to gatekeep people from joining the movement to protect rights. I don't care if they joined as a tin foil hat or just yesterday after having literally been complacent in these atrocities. If you're here now, that's what matters. > Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care. Bull, and bull. There are plenty of people fighting back. I'm pretty sure me getting ads in languages I don't speaks is at least some good sign. Maybe I can't beat the NSA, sure, but can I beat mass surveillance? Can I beat 10%? 50%? 80%? 1% is better than 0% and privacy will die when we decide everything is binary. People care. People are tired. People feel defeated. These are different things. If people didn't care Apple (and even Google) wouldn't advertise themselves as privacy conscious. Signal wouldn't exist and wouldn't have 50 million users. It's not time to lay down and give up. > mingus88 36 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Google Ordered to Identify Who Watched Certain You... Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way. Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crime was committed? We all have. Well, your IEMI was included in a cell tower dump. Probably dozens of times. Did you happen to drive your car over any bridge in the Bay Area lately? Did a municipal vehicle pass you and catch your license plate with their ALPR camera? Guess what? Your name went through a database of an LEO search if they wanted to find a perp for that time/location. Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care. > The Snowden files changed nothing. They didn't change enough, but that isn't nothing.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Stop these arguments because it isn't like one implies the other. And who the fuck cares if someone wasn't but is now. What's the argument, that you're a hipster? That we are nothing in the ocean of people who don't care. Someone upended their entire life to whistleblow on the government doing it as hard proof and no one cares (from a statistical POV, not a "literally 100% of the population" way). They cared more about the boston bombing the month prior, which while tragic is a statistical molecule compared to the impact of what Snowden revealed. >There are plenty of people fighting back. This can be a game of numbers, but it isn't. This can be a game of power, but it isn't. Not enough people are fighting back and not enough powerful people are fighting back. >People care. People are tired. People feel defeated. These are different things well it sounds like they gave up. Different words, samae results
ametrau 3y ago
You play right into their hands by being demoralised (and trying to spread that to others)
andsoitis 3y ago
> Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care. I would argue “people don’t care” because… there isn’t a high enough number of people who suffer negative consequences from “their privacy being invaded”.
- tacocataco 3y ago
  Maybe people would care more if there were more then two viable political parties to choose from? Getting rid of First Past The Post voting in favor of something like Ranked Choice voting would allow people to vote 3rd party with no chance of a spoiler effect. This would introduce competition into the electoral process, improving the quality of candidates available to choose from. Even from within the current two mainstream political parties.
riedel 3y ago
IMHO the problem here is really transparency. There IMHO can be situation in which it could be reasonable. But the concrete cases might be questionable as we are probably not talking about capital crime. In Berlin there used to be a notification system if you were subjected to cell surveillance in Berlin. It was recently stopped [0]. IMHO we need the same for all IP assignment or account lookups. The problem IMHO is that we, individualy, and particularly vulnerable groups like journalists and activists, might be subject to far more of such activities than we know. [0] https://netzpolitik.org/2024/rolle-rueckwaerts-berlin-beendet-transparenz-ueber-funkzellenabfragen/ https://netzpolitik.org/2024/rolle-rueckwaerts-berlin-beende...
- Terr_ 3y ago
  > notification system More-generally, imagine if every citizen was entitled to a yearly report on all how many times law-enforcement received records containing their names or personally identifying information, except in cases that are formally unsolved and in-progress. So a line item might be something like: {Ref ID}, {Date}, "All Youtube accounts that watched {Video Title}"
- godelski 3y ago
  I don't think anyone is saying that rights can't be infringed upon for any reason. The issue is that there needs be sufficient reason. Is this sufficient reason? I think the action is sufficient reason were it specifically targeted at the individual under suspicion. But a dragnet is not. Those innocent people were not under suspicion and were not doing anything wrong or illegal.
verisimi 3y ago
[flagged]
- godelski 3y ago
  You can have privacy and many of these things. You may be interested in homomorphic encryption or the weaker version differential privacy. There are such things as zero knowledge proofs. But I think it is far easier to have these technologies without doing the encrypted aspects or protecting privacy. Then it is more a "never let a tragedy go to waste" situation. Paved with good intentions, right? This will always happen though as we rush and are unable to do things the right way. Often the right way can take the same amount of time but generally appears to take longer and that is enough, even if the wrong way actually takes longer. Because it also matters at what resolution we're concerned with. So I'm saying it is mostly stupidity, not evil. Though evil loves and leverages stupidity.
  - verisimi 3y ago
    [flagged]
- romafirst3 3y ago
  you honestly think there is some masterplan? I love a good conspiracy theory but that is nuts. Nobody has a made a plan so it hasn't been long planned. Shit is just happening and we as a society, a culture and a race are adapting to it like we've always done.
  - preordained 3y ago
    Well, I guess we're just naturally evolving and adapting into enslaving ourselves, just following nature's course... There doesn't need to be a "master plan", but clearly there are some working themes
    - alt227 3y ago
      Yep. Humans are lazy, greedy, and gullible. Give us a device which feeds our brains constant little dopamine hits and we will sacrifice anything for it. Remember the experiments with rats and pigeons that could administer hits of plesure giving drugs? They all hit that button til they died. We are no different.
jpc0 3y ago
There is a distinction I tend to make here. If some person was able to pick me out from a lineup because they physically saw me then that wasn't private and privacy laws don't apply. So for instance capturing my face on CCTV in a public place isn't a privacy violation, same with my license plate in a pulic place. However what happens on my private property is a privacy violation if it is recorded without consent. Certian information isn't private, and that being stored is fine. Where the line gets drawn is what's up for debate. I surely would want my contact details and name saved by a company that I intend to do business with in either direction. However if they spam me with information I should be able to lodge an harrassment claim against them. It's not a privacy issue but a decency issue.
- chgs 3y ago
  > However what happens on my private property is a privacy violation if it is recorded without consent. And the biggest enablers of violation are things like ring doorbells and dashcams. There is no comeback in my country, don’t know about the US. Governmental and commercial cctv has checks and balances. Domestic just goes onto planet wide databases with no control.
- fmobus 3y ago
  That notion isn't universal. In Germany, for instance, I can't install a camera pointing to the street.
  - jpc0 3y ago
    I understand that completely. Just wanted to give a different viewpoint on that. I'm all for finding a balance, it's just that many times people are against surveillance that does actually improve security or enforcement but mildy infringes on their "rights" when in reality they never had privacy in that situation to start with and the use of technology didn't substantially change that. Youtube being forced to give up personal information based on who viewed a video is something I don't see as an issue. How is this any different from any other website getting the exact same order? If you are doing something shady you know how to obfuscate that information, if you aren't, sure your "privacy" was "violated" for sure but it was violated in a way that was legally allowed and by law enforcement at that. Living in a surveillance state where I have no choice but for the government to be able to track every single transaction I make financially and being able to link my cell number amongst other details directly to me, I feel like if I had to try to fight that I would only be causing myself undue anxiety and I've got enough legitimate reasons to be anxious.
detourdog 3y ago
The concept introduced by the Supreme Court regarding Pen register is consistent with all the examples you have given. Anytime you willing share data with a 3rd party the law assumes you aren't keeping it private. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register If you want to keep something private don't share it outside of your house.
- Geezus_42 3y ago
  Except that existing in modern society requires giving immense amounts of personal information for even basic transactions.
  - morkalork 3y ago
    It's beyond absurd and desperately needs to be addressed. Too bad both the government and corporations stand to loose too much that I doubt it will be treated seriously.
    - detourdog 3y ago
      I personally think that the Apple anti-trust is being pushed due to their privacy stance. Apple looked at the pen register cases and realized the best position to be in as a third party is to not possess usable data. The US case from my point of view is trying to fore Apple to share user data with third parties.
      - kmeisthax 3y ago
        How would a successful antitrust verdict against Apple further the NSA's implicit dogma of "insecure by default"? Especially if it winds up breaking up Apple into many pieces. It's far easier for a centralized tech industry to bend the knee to the NSA than a distributed one.
        detourdog 3y ago
        Forcing Apple to hand over data to a third party for commercial reasons (not needing a warrant) is much simpler than whatever scenario you have worked out.
salawat 3y ago
Most people don't know. Or if they know, they don't understand the implications. As Computer Scientists, part of pur whole shtick is to try to spread that lnowledge far and wide. Most, I hazard, spend precious little time on that particular responsibility.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Most people think Facebook secretly records all their conversations because their ad tracking is just that good. They don't know the root cause but they absolutely do understand the implications.
mistrial9 3y ago
"people do not care" - Please stop repeating this false statement. When you repeat it you give it legitimacy, and take the time when other statements could be made. Most people are helpless to make change. Greater than one million adults serve in uniform services of some kind where they literally must comply. The ad budgets and massive, overflowing volumes of money generated by "surveillance capitalism" buy the consent of the mercenary finance occupations. None of this means "nobody cares"
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Please stop repeating this false statement. Society, please stop making it true. >Most people are helpless to make change. you get even 10,000 people to petition something to the government and you can get something rolling. This relatively moderate post probably had 10,000 views. You don't need to do much but you just got to get enough people to care enough to spend 10 minutes making a request. If they can't even do that much... well, they don't care. This is the issue with an individualistic mindset, you hyperfocus on what immediately benefits you. Not the wider community around you which is needed for such petitioning.

skybrian 3y ago

This sounds scary, and yet I seem to be unharmed.

ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
A case is criminal gangs buying from data brokers to scam elders
sriram_malhar 3y ago
Shall we wait on the laws until you personally come to some harm?
- skybrian 3y ago
  No, but the argument did use "you" to imply that the reader was harmed. I consider that an illegitimate scare tactic. It would be better to talk about how someone else might be harmed.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    If you weren't one of the 30k watching the video, you are the "someone else".
alt227 3y ago
Then they came for me. And there was no one left to speak out for me

godelski 3y ago

> Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way. I was mad then. I'm more mad now. Stop these arguments because it isn't like one implies the other. And who the fuck cares if someone wasn't but is now. What's the argument, that you're a hipster? That's not solving problems. I don't want to gatekeep people from joining the movement to protect rights. I don't care if they joined as a tin foil hat or just yesterday after having literally been complacent in these atrocities. If you're here now, that's what matters. > Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care. Bull, and bull. There are plenty of people fighting back. I'm pretty sure me getting ads in languages I don't speaks is at least some good sign. Maybe I can't beat the NSA, sure, but can I beat mass surveillance? Can I beat 10%? 50%? 80%? 1% is better than 0% and privacy will die when we decide everything is binary. People care. People are tired. People feel defeated. These are different things. If people didn't care Apple (and even Google) wouldn't advertise themselves as privacy conscious. Signal wouldn't exist and wouldn't have 50 million users. It's not time to lay down and give up. > mingus88 36 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | on: Google Ordered to Identify Who Watched Certain You... Cell phone tower data has been used for a decade now in pretty much the same way. Did you happen to pass by a cell tower in a major city around the time a crime was committed? We all have. Well, your IEMI was included in a cell tower dump. Probably dozens of times. Did you happen to drive your car over any bridge in the Bay Area lately? Did a municipal vehicle pass you and catch your license plate with their ALPR camera? Guess what? Your name went through a database of an LEO search if they wanted to find a perp for that time/location. Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care. > The Snowden files changed nothing. They didn't change enough, but that isn't nothing.

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Stop these arguments because it isn't like one implies the other. And who the fuck cares if someone wasn't but is now. What's the argument, that you're a hipster? That we are nothing in the ocean of people who don't care. Someone upended their entire life to whistleblow on the government doing it as hard proof and no one cares (from a statistical POV, not a "literally 100% of the population" way). They cared more about the boston bombing the month prior, which while tragic is a statistical molecule compared to the impact of what Snowden revealed. >There are plenty of people fighting back. This can be a game of numbers, but it isn't. This can be a game of power, but it isn't. Not enough people are fighting back and not enough powerful people are fighting back. >People care. People are tired. People feel defeated. These are different things well it sounds like they gave up. Different words, samae results

ametrau 3y ago

You play right into their hands by being demoralised (and trying to spread that to others)

andsoitis 3y ago

> Privacy has been dead for a long time. The worst part is people don’t care. I would argue “people don’t care” because… there isn’t a high enough number of people who suffer negative consequences from “their privacy being invaded”.

tacocataco 3y ago
Maybe people would care more if there were more then two viable political parties to choose from? Getting rid of First Past The Post voting in favor of something like Ranked Choice voting would allow people to vote 3rd party with no chance of a spoiler effect. This would introduce competition into the electoral process, improving the quality of candidates available to choose from. Even from within the current two mainstream political parties.

riedel 3y ago

IMHO the problem here is really transparency. There IMHO can be situation in which it could be reasonable. But the concrete cases might be questionable as we are probably not talking about capital crime. In Berlin there used to be a notification system if you were subjected to cell surveillance in Berlin. It was recently stopped [0]. IMHO we need the same for all IP assignment or account lookups. The problem IMHO is that we, individualy, and particularly vulnerable groups like journalists and activists, might be subject to far more of such activities than we know. [0] https://netzpolitik.org/2024/rolle-rueckwaerts-berlin-beendet-transparenz-ueber-funkzellenabfragen/ https://netzpolitik.org/2024/rolle-rueckwaerts-berlin-beende...

Terr_ 3y ago
> notification system More-generally, imagine if every citizen was entitled to a yearly report on all how many times law-enforcement received records containing their names or personally identifying information, except in cases that are formally unsolved and in-progress. So a line item might be something like: {Ref ID}, {Date}, "All Youtube accounts that watched {Video Title}"
godelski 3y ago
I don't think anyone is saying that rights can't be infringed upon for any reason. The issue is that there needs be sufficient reason. Is this sufficient reason? I think the action is sufficient reason were it specifically targeted at the individual under suspicion. But a dragnet is not. Those innocent people were not under suspicion and were not doing anything wrong or illegal.

verisimi 3y ago

[flagged]

godelski 3y ago
You can have privacy and many of these things. You may be interested in homomorphic encryption or the weaker version differential privacy. There are such things as zero knowledge proofs. But I think it is far easier to have these technologies without doing the encrypted aspects or protecting privacy. Then it is more a "never let a tragedy go to waste" situation. Paved with good intentions, right? This will always happen though as we rush and are unable to do things the right way. Often the right way can take the same amount of time but generally appears to take longer and that is enough, even if the wrong way actually takes longer. Because it also matters at what resolution we're concerned with. So I'm saying it is mostly stupidity, not evil. Though evil loves and leverages stupidity.
- verisimi 3y ago
  [flagged]
romafirst3 3y ago
you honestly think there is some masterplan? I love a good conspiracy theory but that is nuts. Nobody has a made a plan so it hasn't been long planned. Shit is just happening and we as a society, a culture and a race are adapting to it like we've always done.
- preordained 3y ago
  Well, I guess we're just naturally evolving and adapting into enslaving ourselves, just following nature's course... There doesn't need to be a "master plan", but clearly there are some working themes
  - alt227 3y ago
    Yep. Humans are lazy, greedy, and gullible. Give us a device which feeds our brains constant little dopamine hits and we will sacrifice anything for it. Remember the experiments with rats and pigeons that could administer hits of plesure giving drugs? They all hit that button til they died. We are no different.

jpc0 3y ago

There is a distinction I tend to make here. If some person was able to pick me out from a lineup because they physically saw me then that wasn't private and privacy laws don't apply. So for instance capturing my face on CCTV in a public place isn't a privacy violation, same with my license plate in a pulic place. However what happens on my private property is a privacy violation if it is recorded without consent. Certian information isn't private, and that being stored is fine. Where the line gets drawn is what's up for debate. I surely would want my contact details and name saved by a company that I intend to do business with in either direction. However if they spam me with information I should be able to lodge an harrassment claim against them. It's not a privacy issue but a decency issue.

chgs 3y ago
> However what happens on my private property is a privacy violation if it is recorded without consent. And the biggest enablers of violation are things like ring doorbells and dashcams. There is no comeback in my country, don’t know about the US. Governmental and commercial cctv has checks and balances. Domestic just goes onto planet wide databases with no control.
fmobus 3y ago
That notion isn't universal. In Germany, for instance, I can't install a camera pointing to the street.
- jpc0 3y ago
  I understand that completely. Just wanted to give a different viewpoint on that. I'm all for finding a balance, it's just that many times people are against surveillance that does actually improve security or enforcement but mildy infringes on their "rights" when in reality they never had privacy in that situation to start with and the use of technology didn't substantially change that. Youtube being forced to give up personal information based on who viewed a video is something I don't see as an issue. How is this any different from any other website getting the exact same order? If you are doing something shady you know how to obfuscate that information, if you aren't, sure your "privacy" was "violated" for sure but it was violated in a way that was legally allowed and by law enforcement at that. Living in a surveillance state where I have no choice but for the government to be able to track every single transaction I make financially and being able to link my cell number amongst other details directly to me, I feel like if I had to try to fight that I would only be causing myself undue anxiety and I've got enough legitimate reasons to be anxious.

detourdog 3y ago

The concept introduced by the Supreme Court regarding Pen register is consistent with all the examples you have given. Anytime you willing share data with a 3rd party the law assumes you aren't keeping it private. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register If you want to keep something private don't share it outside of your house.

Geezus_42 3y ago
Except that existing in modern society requires giving immense amounts of personal information for even basic transactions.
- morkalork 3y ago
  It's beyond absurd and desperately needs to be addressed. Too bad both the government and corporations stand to loose too much that I doubt it will be treated seriously.
  - detourdog 3y ago
    I personally think that the Apple anti-trust is being pushed due to their privacy stance. Apple looked at the pen register cases and realized the best position to be in as a third party is to not possess usable data. The US case from my point of view is trying to fore Apple to share user data with third parties.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      How would a successful antitrust verdict against Apple further the NSA's implicit dogma of "insecure by default"? Especially if it winds up breaking up Apple into many pieces. It's far easier for a centralized tech industry to bend the knee to the NSA than a distributed one.
      - detourdog 3y ago
        Forcing Apple to hand over data to a third party for commercial reasons (not needing a warrant) is much simpler than whatever scenario you have worked out.

salawat 3y ago

Most people don't know. Or if they know, they don't understand the implications. As Computer Scientists, part of pur whole shtick is to try to spread that lnowledge far and wide. Most, I hazard, spend precious little time on that particular responsibility.

kmeisthax 3y ago
Most people think Facebook secretly records all their conversations because their ad tracking is just that good. They don't know the root cause but they absolutely do understand the implications.

mistrial9 3y ago

"people do not care" - Please stop repeating this false statement. When you repeat it you give it legitimacy, and take the time when other statements could be made. Most people are helpless to make change. Greater than one million adults serve in uniform services of some kind where they literally must comply. The ad budgets and massive, overflowing volumes of money generated by "surveillance capitalism" buy the consent of the mercenary finance occupations. None of this means "nobody cares"

johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Please stop repeating this false statement. Society, please stop making it true. >Most people are helpless to make change. you get even 10,000 people to petition something to the government and you can get something rolling. This relatively moderate post probably had 10,000 views. You don't need to do much but you just got to get enough people to care enough to spend 10 minutes making a request. If they can't even do that much... well, they don't care. This is the issue with an individualistic mindset, you hyperfocus on what immediately benefits you. Not the wider community around you which is needed for such petitioning.