3 ms·

Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP

by 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 TGower 1y ago

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.