Privacy advocates got access to Locate X, a phone tracking tool which multiple U.S. agencies have bought access to, and showed me and other journalists exactly what it was capable of. Tracking a phone from one state to another to an abortion clinic. Multiple places of worship. A school. Following a likely juror to a residence. And all of this tracking is possible without a warrant, and instead just a few clicks of a mouse.
This should be illegal. There is absolutely no good reason this should be available to anybody. It should also be considered unconstitutional; if one of those dots is a person, whether you directly know who the person is or not, it should violate the right to privacy and the right of illegal search and seizure — no questions asked.
You are right. And you’re fighting against the credit reporting agencies and google, facebook, apple, and all car manufacturers for privacy rights.
This is the result of jurists and legislators who don’t understand a single goddamned thing about computers in 2024. For fuck’s sake it’s been thirty goddamned years since this was obviously going to happen. Take a class, you bastards! Those of you who aren’t Heritage Foundation fascists.
It’s not getting better either: https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems
There seems to have been a short window of maybe two decades in the 80s and 90s when computers and the Internet were becoming household staples where almost everyone who grew up in that time period knows what’s up, while everyone who didn’t is way more ignorant. The older folks are lost because they didn’t grow up with computers. The younger kids are lost because they were born into a world of advanced UIs, “plug and play”, and software that heavily obfuscates the nitty gritty details of how it works.
Being forced to run command line installers, edit config.sys files, set DIP switches correctly for your front side bus speed and messing with IRQ settings for your sound card and such just to play a computer game will definitely teach you a thing or two. My family’s PC came with not only an instruction manual, but an entire language reference for the built in GW-Basic interpreter. Nowadays, you get a laptop with a small pamphlet showing you how to plug it in and turn it on.
That explains why cars got so much worse once Boomers were no longer their primary market.
I’m convinced that a good number of legislators understand the implications of this stuff on a cursory level, but are convinced (read: bribed) to not care on the “condition” that it doesn’t apply to them or their families. They are beholden to their constituents, and their constituents aren’t you and me, as we can’t afford them.
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Search and seizure, the Fourth Amendment, only applies to State actors. The only exception is when a private entity is acting as an agent of the government, such as in the case of private prisons.
Congress needs to pass consumer protection laws aimed at privacy in the digital age. They haven’t updated this sort of thing I believe since 1996. It used to be legal for adult video stores to disclose the tapes people rented, but Congress passed a privacy law forbidding it when some journalists disclosed some of their rentals. The scandal had some cool name. I forgot what.
The government cannot access the information without a warrant. It does not matter if SPYco lays it all out on a public website. If they needed a warrant to track you before, they need a warrant to check for you on the public website.
Saying the government is allowed to obliterate the 4th amendment because a private company did the hard part is just asking for government aligned corporations to gather it all up and hand it over whenever the government gives them a dollar.
Edit to add- This is the way it should work. Instead the government really is just buying data they’d need a warrant for previously.
This is not an area of law I stay up to date on, but that did not used to be the case. Is that a rather new development?
Last I knew most courts were holding that since customers are sharing this information with third parties (sharing with their phone companies, Apple and Google, Facebook, etc.), giving everything away anyway, most individuals have waived any claim to an expectation of privacy. The right to privacy is founded upon reasonable expectations. I did hear about some pushback on that, more recently, but not from the Court of Appeals from DC, which has jurisdiction over appeals taken from federal agencies, prior to the Supreme Court. I’d be grateful to be shown otherwise. About time, if true.
Yeah I should have been more clear. That’s the way it should work. Instead the courts interpret the 4th amendment as narrowly as possible. Making it effectively non-existent in many cases.
The solution is to subscribe to these services. Then create a website that offers real-time tracking information, freely to the public, of the most wealthy and powerful people in the country. Every Congressperson should have their location shown freely available to all in real time. You could call it “wheresmyrep.org” or similar. Literally all of them tracked like animals in real time, freely shown for any and all to see. Let them live in the fish bowl they’ve created for us all.
We’re kind of seeing that with those private jet trackers. But that’s not changing anything except getting those accounts banned from social media.
I think those just need to move to have their own independent sites instead of basing their operations on social media. Ultimately what they’re doing is entirely legal, but it’s way too easy for some asshat billionaire to pull some strings to get them pulled from a platform.
Yep. Spin up your own website and throw a couple YouTube ads out into the world. We’ll have legislation drafted making this illegal before your first server bill comes due.
Although we already know what would likely happen if someone did that. It would just be made illegal to track the locations of congresspeople (and only congresspeople), like it was made illegal to do so during the BLM protests.
Just like how the moment their videotape rental history was exposed, that was when privacy became an absolute must in the case of video rental services.
When supreme court justice kavanaugh was followed by protesters he had a hissy fit and said they couldnt do that. But it’s totally fine to spy on everyone with a phone and expose their medical data.
These hypocritical fuckheads deserve exactly what you are proposing and I’d fucking love to see it happen.
We could even say it’s to protect the children… make sure certain politicians who have expressed interest in legalizing child marriage aren’t left alone with any.
Time for faraday cage phone covers/bags to become popular in these states.
Get this in front of the Supreme Court ASAP!
…oh…
It drives me nuts how our economic system is making not having a cell phone increasingly difficult. Many necessary things won’t even work on a tablet. The smartphone is the most amazing futuristic device I dreamed about that has evolved into a distopian nightmare.
It drives me nuts how our economic system is making not having a cell phone increasingly difficult.
that’s by design. why you do you think the US government allows corporate interests to take such a high position above American citizens? it’s not just only because of corruption, it’s because one hand washes the other.
The smartphone is the most amazing futuristic device I dreamed about that has evolved into a distopian nightmare.
like all technology, it can be used in ways that you cannot even imagine.
instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.
imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can’t even tell what’s real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.
instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.
imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can’t even tell what’s real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.
There’s an ad blocker that does exactly this. Called Ad Nauseam. Chrome blocked it from their store super fast, then blocked it from being installed in Chrome from 3rd party sites, then blocked known versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode. I used to run it set to a low percentage - if I “clicked” every ad they’d know to throw my data out, but if I click say 3% of them…
Run a headless browser that does random searches at random times across different social media and search engines and have it click random ads.
you can essentially already do this with TrackMeNot and AdNauseam
This was part of the fictional operating system in the book Little Brother. I think it inspired similar features in a particular real life Linux build too
that’s by design.
See also: automobiles. Automobiles and smartphones certainly have strong cases for how utilitarian they are. They are both genuinely very useful.
But the expectation that everyone has one, along with them becoming practically a requirement for most people, has turned them into a dependency and a means of control. Some people can manage to forgo them, but you almost have to build your life around doing so.
ML breaks this defense
does it though? if everyone is sharing their advertising data under the covers no amount of ML could correct it.
think of it like a tor network for advertisement tracking.
you’re going to Walmart, I’m going to Target. but according to our phones, I’m at Walmart and you’re at Target. now scale it up to thousands or even millions of users sharing their advertising trackers.
It is only dystopian because we have not taken back the power to control our devices. We of course need some serious privacy laws to allow this to happen. Right now is the defining moment for the 21st century. Will we take control of our technology or be enslaved by it?
I don’t see smartphones being better unless they are completely different. Since its basically iphone and an iphone mimic and its just the way the whole ecosystems are built. Like you can install a free smartphone os but you will not be able to do things with it at the same level as someone without one as far as corps and stuff.
The smartphone has effectively turned into a leash.
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That does not sound like a viable long term solution to me.
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I’d be surprised if it lasted longer than any other socially progressive trend. A few weeks, tops, with largest proportions falling off in the first week.
This is the reality of social momentum these days. Resistance is no threat because it has extremely brief lifespan before moving onto the next thing to be a part of.
I agree but not because it’s “trends” but because this system forces us to have short attention spans by presenting us with a massive deluge of information about horrible things happening everywhere (many of which are caused either directly or indirectly by that very system) so we have basically no choice but to keep shifting our focus and updating our threat assessments or risk becoming totally overwhelmed and falling behind or burning out.
I instinctively closed your comment after reading “short attention span” because I knew what you were going to say. Had to go back to comment because I realise the irony.
What about an app that spoofs location?
It also won’t work since the service has enough precision to know whether you go in, and for how long. The real issue is that mobile phones are continuously broadcasting their location to any device that wants to listen, even if you turn wifi and bluetooth off.
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Or - OR, right, everyone can turn off location and WiFi on their phones.
It’s true the cell ping is always going, but that’s a different thing and definitely not what this tool is using to track people. Odds are good it’s using facebook or some other cancer to perform this evil.
The problem is turning off wifi doesn’t actually turn off the wifi, it just stops a subset of packets being broadcast and won’t trasmit any data you want it to send. Among other things this is how ‘find my device’ works with the wifi and bluetooth “off”. They’re actually on.
You can turn this wifi and bt scanning/‘location accuracy improvements’ off though, at least on android. It’s tucked away in the settings but once it’s done, it’s done.
Odds are good it’s using facebook or some other cancer to perform this evil.
You really need to read the entire article. Turning off your WiFi and deleting Facebook isn’t going to fix this.
It’s a good start tho
This sort of surveillance is only possible because of the mobile advertising ecosystem. Location data is sometimes used to build profiles on device users and better target advertisements to them. Much of that advertising relies on a MAID, the unique advertising ID, on a phone. The MAID acts as the digital glue between a device and its associated data.
But that same underlying system, of Google and Apple linking a unique identifier on the phone to a user’s activity, allows Babel Street and others to build their mass monitoring products. In many cases, a device’s MAID is also displayed inside Babel Street.
So periodically refresh / replace your ad id as well.
Or - OR, right, everyone can turn off location and WiFi on their phones.
Right now. But maybe not forever and so regulation to make sure that we canor even better, regs against this tracking. Because it shouldn’t be necessary.
Start tracking politician phones. Oh look who paid a visit to the lobbyist house this week! That shit will get shut down real quick.
Lol next story over is this https://infosec.pub/post/19174603
If you don’t want to be tracked illegally, don’t bring your phone.
If you don’t want any to be tracked legally, write/call/tweet/visit your representatives.
edit: responded to the wrong comment
Ah yes, democracy is a healthy and fully functioning institution.
You just got confused who’s sponsoring it, that’s understandable.
What else would you suggest to do about it?
Throw it down and bring real democracy like in Switzerland
Or throw it down and bring anarchism
None of these are realistic, so…
I see your point. I have no illusions that democracy is healthy in modern times. Perhaps not ever? We don’t even live in a democracy any more, we live in a corporatocracy.
But doing nothing will solve nothing.
edited to add: In fact, it’s our complacency that our corporate masters depend on. Corporate news is designed to overwhelm you. Advertising is designed to lull you to sleep. Together, they make it seem like there’s nothing you can do. But that’s not true. You can do something. Maybe not the things I suggested, but something. It will make a difference, even if it only makes a small difference for a few people. Isn’t that better than nothing?
If you don’t want any to be tracked legally, write/call/tweet/visit your representatives.
And donate to the EFF if you have the means because they can and have and will likely continue to lobby on average internet users behalf!
I sure wouldn’t vote for someone who met with lobbyists.
Do you?
All politicians meet with lobbyists. It’s hard to get a handle on the needs of the nation (or state, or so on), and lobbying is how people inform their representatives of that need. Now whether those lobbyists are scumbags or saints, that’s a different question.
“I got nothing to hide. I’m a boring person” dumbass mfers
I got nothing to hide.
I’m willing to bet that they have curtains on their bedroom window…
I’m willing to bet they lock their doors
all because they’re afraid someone will laugh at their micro dick.
they not wrong tho, I be laughin at them regardless.
“Got nothing to hide” - Man wearing pants
“why don’t you take your clothes off, then? You said you ‘have nothing to hide’, didn’t you?”
I’ve heard this exact same thing from a former colleague that left my company to go work at a place selling “smart” security systems 🤦🏻♂️
This is nothing new. Did we already forget about the Snowden leaks?
The leaks that 2% of the population got very excited about for a while, but try not to think much about? The leaks judged by many on the reputation of an obscure man living in Russia? Those leaks?
I trust my government and not things only nerds understand. Also they sound weird and made up and very scary ( said most of the people)
Maybe, I think people still “know” its going on, but they forget by the allure of our smart phones, so this is a good reminder.
Why stop at phones? Practically every car made today has a 4g modem and gps module onboard.
The EFF have a bit more general information about location data brokers. Well worth a read.
God I hate data brokers. Rats! All of them, vermin contributing nothing of value to society.
How is this not a warrantless search?
It is, but the USA hasn’t cared since Snowden.
UNDERTALE???!?!?!??11
Because a carrier’s data on you is not your person or belongings. The companies holding this data are selling access to it, so it’s not being searched, it’s being offered.
In other words, the same reason as why they don’t need a search warrant if there’s a breaking and the business across the street volunteers their security camera footage, even if you’re on that footage.
Courts have actually said that looking back at someone’s location data counts as a search and requires a warrant. There’s currently a lawsuit recently filed by the institute for justice aledging that the use of flock safety license plate readers is unconstitutional because it’s a warrantless search.
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Our electoral system results in a choice between two candidates, and both are fine with it.
And more over the electorate is calcified along party lines where the outcomes for either side is perceived as being stark and dire. I suspect this means concerns like these might get stifled even if it is held by both parties.
I was just traveling in the UK and I had this discussion more than once having to explain why our options are always terrible and ignoring issues voters want addressed.
I definitely support federal Privacy legislation. Here’s at least one take on the issue.
Privacy regulations are to the left of the Overton window. The idea that corporations don’t have some divinely ordained ownership of our personal data is unthinkably radical.
It’s such a non-problem to my family members that if I even suggest it is a problem, I get ignored.
No one cares. It’s either nothing anyone values or they figured they never had any privacy to begin with.
You don’t hear about it because the two major parties both oppose them and have nothing to argue about
improving the healthcare system is not even a topic of discussion this time around let alone something most people would see as abstract
It’s not mentioned because only things rich people care about are mentioned on our rich people news programs
a device that constantly connects to antennas all over the place, is used to track your location.
who would have thought?
if you dont wanna get tracked - dont bring your phone.
If you don’t want to be tracked illegally, don’t bring your phone.
If you don’t want any to be tracked legally, write/call/tweet/visit your representatives.
Also just write your Supreme Court and ask them how this isn’t a flagrant violation of the intent of the fourth amendment. Seriously the founding fathers would be asking what the fuck about this. They weren’t good people but they would’ve been privacy nuts.
if you’re talking about the supreme court, as in the SCOTUS, they’re long past pretending they give the slightest fuck about the bill of rights.
Oh absolutely but it annoys them when they’re called out about it
“The fourth amendment means what we say it means” – SCOTUS, probably.
The US Supreme Court has had an antagonistic relationship to the forth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States since before I was a kid in the 1970s since they often interfered with efforts to round up nonwhites. But after the 9/11 attacks and the PATRIOT ACT, SCOTUS has been shredding both amendments with carve-out exceptions.
Then Law Enforcement uses tech without revealing it in court, often lying ( parallel reconstruction ) to conceal questionable use, and the courts give them the benefit of the doubt.
Or, you know, let the gov work for you, not against you, & fully expect people to get jailed if they track you.
It’s a matter of perspective what the minimum standard should be.
Especially when a personal device like a phone is basically necessary for a normal life and even public services.
Or we could get rights protecting us from this. Especially considering that that’s a reasonable interpretation of the fourth amendment and the ninth amendment.
We already have rights protecting us from this. They aren’t being enforced.
Meanwhile when I turn off Bluetooth on my iPhone it says “for the next y hours” and there’s no option to turn it off permanently.
Don’t buy Apple?
and there’s no option to turn it off permanently.
Did you actually try looking this up. Turn it off in settings and it’s off forever until you turn it back on.
Maybe you need arch btw
Wouldn’t just keeping your phone in a metal box prevent it from communicating with anything? Keep your phone in a metal box and only take it out when you need it. Only take it out in a location that isn’t sensitive. Or hell, just make a little sleeve out of aluminum foil. Literally just wrapping your phone in aluminum foil should prevent it from connecting to anything. A tinfoil hat won’t serve as an effective Faraday cage for your brain, but fully wrapping your phone in aluminum foil should do the job. Even better, as it’s a phone, such a foil sleeve should be quite testable. Build it, put your phone in it, and try texting and calling it. If surrounded fully by a conductive material, the phone should be completely incapable of sending or receiving signals.
A Faraday cage is supposed to be grounded, so aluminum foil isn’t the same thing. Maybe you could turn the phone off, wrap it in foil, and then place it upon a conductive metal surface that is grounded, such as a 240v kitchen appliance
You could also just turn it off.
You sure it’s still not phoning home? How do you know “off” is really “off” anymore with a modern phone? It’s not like an old flip phone that you can just pop the battery out. Sure it sounds paranoid, but we’re literally talking about something that used to be the realm of crackpots and cranks - “the government is tracking all of us 24/7!” Well, it seems that’s actually literally the case now.
I absolutely do not trust that an “off” phone is actually off, unless the battery is removed (assuming it can be).
Yes. When your phone is off, it is off.
If you’re paranoid you can buy a faraday bag.
The iPhone remote locator function still works when the phone is powered off. It doesn’t work when the battery is completely dead, but it does work when the phone is supposedly “powered off.” This is irrefutable proof that iPhones at least retain some of their functions even when you’ve “turned them off.”
This is where paranoia comes into play. That’s Apple’s information. Not anyone else’s. If you believe Apple is selling it to this company and ignoring the phone setting that enables it then use the faraday bag.
But this company is not getting that information directly. It gets your information from cell tower pings at best, and social media scraping at worst.
I don’t want to encourage paranoia here but “off” does not mean “off”. Modern phones are almost never actually “powered down”. If you’re paranoid, turning your phone off is not enough. Leave it behind.
(Also a gap in your phone’s location history can also be used against you, fwiw.)
Yeah, and Alexa/Siri/Google assistant don’t eavesdrop unless you use the magic words to activate them.
There has to be some way that we could have created the architecture to do everything a phone does without letting a user be triangulated easily.
I know there is no incentive to do that, but it amazes me how far ahead the security of the web is compared to phone tech.
Like maybe if phones could authenticate without broadcasting a unique identifier. And maybe they could open a vpn style encrypted tunnel and perform their auth over that tunnel.
Idk, I know nothing about phones, but it has to be possible.
there’s the ole https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/
kitschy name, but when it was established it was not even planning anything like what it is doing now. meshnet is the section you’re looking for.
Don’t bring your phone.
Get a burner and set up call forwarding.
burner goes from your house, to abortion clinic, to your office, back to your house
Hmm, must be someone else, I don’t recognize this number
-The Government
You really can’t think of a solution to this?
You really think you came up with an airtight solution to device tracking that nobody in the industry has considered on a whim?
Ok how’s the industry tracking a phone with no power?
No that’s not easily possible on every phone. It’s a specifically crafted FakeOff malware, used by the NSA for targeted attacks. This is not something that just randomly gets deployed on every phone, it’s only used against individual targets. Use GrapheneOS to harden your Android device as much as possible, to defend against such malware getting installed in the first place.
You really think the NSA will get involved to track someone who wants to get an abortion?
That was possible over a decade ago.
You know what also existed over a decade ago? Faraday bags. This concept of physics isn’t new.
Just stop spreading fear and misinformation.
You really think the NSA will get involved to track someone who wants to get an abortion?
Probably not, unless it’s an exceptional case where they are already interested for another reason.
But if, say, county sheriffs across the country also got access, I would be surprised if I didn’t hear about women’s and doctors’ lives being ruined by them.
Yes, yes. If you want to avoid being tracked by the government buy a Faraday bag. Thank you for the valuable information. I’m in awe.
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Hm. I said without power. Not switched off.
Judging by the upvotes you’re far from the only one who forgot about simply removing the battery.
I suggested no power but not for the entire trip. Put the battery in when you’re sufficiently far from your house so as not to be associated with it. Remove it again when you’re sufficiently close to your house.
Use your imagination. It helps.
You know, we can talk about how batteries aren’t removable in most phones anymore, about whether or not the act of suddenly buying prepaid phones isn’t itself incriminating, any number of factors, but I really only replied to you because you were rude, not because I wanted to talk about it.
But that’s not a burner phone, that’s an off phone.
Keep reading the thread. I’ve already addressed this.
Really getting confused as to how people read “no power” and think “phone off” instead of “no power”.
Archive: https://archive.ph/bSrZR
tl;dr: It’s basically a MAID attack, along with the usual suspects of social media, navigation, and weather apps.
Thank you for this, I had to scroll down so far to find a subscription-wall free link. Makes me wonder if anyone actually checked the article…
this combined with the whole “your pager/phone is now a bomb” texture that the IDF decided to add into the mix should make for interesting times.
soon you will be the drone.
That required special assembly. It was not a hack blowing up commercial batteries. That’s not a possible thing. They gave Hezbollah pagers and radios with explosives built in.
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how does one change your imei number using a pixel 6a, with a rooted phone with magisk.
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Still can’t escape cell tower triangulation
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The IMEI can’t be changed. That’s the serial number of the cellular modem
Edit: reviewing the link you shared in another comment that looks plausible. Just be warned good luck on any kind of warranty or insurance claims if you change IMEIs. I used to work for a cell phone manufacturer and we used the IMEI to both identify roughly when the device was purchased to make determining warranty status dead simple, and to identify devices as they went through the repair process.
Additionally carriers will often blacklist IMEIs for activation (usually on devices which were financed but never paid off) so that’s another potential opportunity for trouble
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Apple and Google can fix the problem. Apps are required to ask for permission to access location information. Most of the time, it’s for tracking and analytics, not anything related to the app’s functionality. That’s the data that is leaking to these data brokers.
In those cases, if asked, user can say no, but apps keep haranguing you until you capitulate.
Instead, the OS could add a button that says: “Yes, but randomize.” After that, location data is returned as normal, but from totally random locations nearby. They could even spoof the data clustering algorithms and just pick some rando location and keep showing returns to them, or just trade the data from one random phone for another every N days.
You do this enough and the data will become polluted enough to become useless.
I don’t think this would be technically useful to prevent exploitation of location data. The handset always has to identify to a tower using the SIM card, which is going to identify the phone and its user. Your cellular service provider can still sell this information to data brokers.
With that said, I would love the option to lie about my location to apps that have no business knowing it.
You have the option to spoof/fake/mock it manually with an app. This one, it seems, even has some available add-ons for mocking UnifiedNlp data and more…)
Mock my GPS (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location/
Mock my GPS UnifiedNlp Backend (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location.service.microg_nlp_backend/
Mock Silently (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location.silently/
Possibly you’ll have to enable dev options and set the location spoofing app in there. At least, I remember seeing the option in there, but that was years ago.
This changes location reported to applications by the OS. It doesn’t change that your signal is coming from a direction and distance as known by the tower tracking the phone. MIMO and other beamforming techniques use this data to boost signal, but it is also collected for monitoring.
Apple and Google want to sell that data, they’re not going to help you obscure it.
