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>Is there a single company out there making it's money selling access to an area code database? So if someone is making money off of it it's suddenly "surveill

by gruez 1y ago

>Is there a single company out there making it's money selling access to an area code database? So if someone is making money off of it it's suddenly "surveillance capitalism"? What makes it more or less "surveillance capitalism" compared to aws selling cloudfront to some ad company? Moreover you can do better than area level code granularity. When landlines were more common and local number portability wasn't really a thing, can look at the CO number (second group) to figure out which town or neighborhood a phone number was from. Even if this was all information you could theoretically determine yourself, I'm sure there are companies that package up the data in a nice database for companies to use. In that case is that "surveillance capitalism"? Where's the "surveillance" aspect? It's not like you need to stalk anyone to figure out where a CO is located. That was just a property of the phone network. >GeoIP databases are much higher resolution and use active scanning methods like ping timing. If a company was spam calling me to estimate distance based on call connection lag, yes that would be surveillance capitalism. Why is the fact it's "active" or not a relevant factor in determining whether it's "surveillance capitalism" or not? Moreover spam calling people might be bad for other reasons, but it's not exactly "surveillance".

TGower 1y ago
Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP to determine their physical location, you are engaged in a form of surveillance. If you have a copy of the table of area codes to city mapping, you are not engaged in surviellance. If you aren't trying to make money, you are not engaged in capitallism.
- gruez 1y ago
  >Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP to determine their physical location, you are engaged in a form of surveillance. Setting aside the problem with pinging home IPs (most home routers have ICMP echo requests disabled), your definition of "systematic observation" seems very flimsy. Is monitoring the global BGP routing table "systematic observation"? What about scraping RIR records? How is sending ICMP echo requests and observing the response times meaningfully similar to what google et al are doing? I doubt many people are upset about google "systematically observing"... the contents of books (for google books), or the layout of cities (for google maps, ignoring streetview). They're upset about google building dossiers on people. Observing the locations of groups of IP addresses (I'm not aware of any geoip products that can deanonymize specific IP addresses) seems very divorced from that, such that any attempts at equating the two because "systematic observation" is non-nonsensical.
  - TGower 1y ago
    It seems like you missed the specifier "of places and people". Books are not people or places, but an IP addresses at any point in time is tied to either a specific person or place. > They're upset about google building dossiers on people. Their location being in that dossier is part of what upsets people.
    - gruez 1y ago
      >but an IP addresses at any point in time is tied to either a specific person or place. Except I'm not aware of any geoip databases that operate on a per-IP level. It's way too noisy, given that basically everyone uses dynamic IP addresses. At best you can figure out a given /24 is used by a given ISP to cover a certain neighborhood, not that 1.2.3.4 belongs is John Smith or 742 Evergreen Terrace.
      - TGower 1y ago
        Good to know, that does shift my opinion a bit. There is a spectrum from surveilling individuals to gathering population statistics. I'm not sure exactly where data that identifies a user to a group size of ~250 falls, especially given the geographic correlation, but it's definitely better.
      - miki123211 1y ago
        Google does it I think? At least in some cases, e.g. when multiple devices that are logged into their respective Google accounts are using that IP, and Google knows what location those usually reside at when together. I've had Google pop up reliable location results for me, to the granularity of a small town, even if they had no information about me specifically to help them deduce this. It doesn't always happen though.

by gruez 1y ago

TGower 1y ago

Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP to determine their physical location, you are engaged in a form of surveillance. If you have a copy of the table of area codes to city mapping, you are not engaged in surviellance. If you aren't trying to make money, you are not engaged in capitallism.

gruez 1y ago
>Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP to determine their physical location, you are engaged in a form of surveillance. Setting aside the problem with pinging home IPs (most home routers have ICMP echo requests disabled), your definition of "systematic observation" seems very flimsy. Is monitoring the global BGP routing table "systematic observation"? What about scraping RIR records? How is sending ICMP echo requests and observing the response times meaningfully similar to what google et al are doing? I doubt many people are upset about google "systematically observing"... the contents of books (for google books), or the layout of cities (for google maps, ignoring streetview). They're upset about google building dossiers on people. Observing the locations of groups of IP addresses (I'm not aware of any geoip products that can deanonymize specific IP addresses) seems very divorced from that, such that any attempts at equating the two because "systematic observation" is non-nonsensical.
- TGower 1y ago
  It seems like you missed the specifier "of places and people". Books are not people or places, but an IP addresses at any point in time is tied to either a specific person or place. > They're upset about google building dossiers on people. Their location being in that dossier is part of what upsets people.
  - gruez 1y ago
    >but an IP addresses at any point in time is tied to either a specific person or place. Except I'm not aware of any geoip databases that operate on a per-IP level. It's way too noisy, given that basically everyone uses dynamic IP addresses. At best you can figure out a given /24 is used by a given ISP to cover a certain neighborhood, not that 1.2.3.4 belongs is John Smith or 742 Evergreen Terrace.
    - TGower 1y ago
      Good to know, that does shift my opinion a bit. There is a spectrum from surveilling individuals to gathering population statistics. I'm not sure exactly where data that identifies a user to a group size of ~250 falls, especially given the geographic correlation, but it's definitely better.
    - miki123211 1y ago
      Google does it I think? At least in some cases, e.g. when multiple devices that are logged into their respective Google accounts are using that IP, and Google knows what location those usually reside at when together. I've had Google pop up reliable location results for me, to the granularity of a small town, even if they had no information about me specifically to help them deduce this. It doesn't always happen though.