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Posted (edited)

Last year in the ESNOG congress in Spain we had a very disturbing talk.

 

A researcher from the University of Barcelona had been studying the data broker "ecosystem". All those "partners we share data with" admitted by plenty of websites like newspapers. Some of the companies were front companies based in tax havens.

 

And this happens in Europe where we have a very strong privacy regulation. Say no more.

 

Edited by borjam
typo
Posted

It's a bit rich for this warning to be coming from the NSA of all places.  Especially when that warning does nothing but rehash information that has been publicly known for years and which has been largely greeted with a collective public shrug.  For the most part, people don't care if they are being tracked, or they are willing to trade being tracked for whatever convenience their apps offer in exchange.

 

The only real solution is don't use apps, and, increasingly, don't use smartphones.  This is a sacrifice I'm willing to make, but most people aren't, and increasingly, not having a smartphone cuts you off from all sorts of unexpected things in the real world.  Restaurant reservations, specialized ticketing apps, being unable to pay for parking, there's a long list of real-world consequences to not using a smartphone.

 

Putting the responsibility on users to "make choices" about their privacy is really disingenuous.  When that choice is accept tracking or be unable to take your significant other on a movie date, it's not a viable choice.  We do the things we have to do to live, and we accept tracking as a cost of doing business, if you will.

 

Changing that requires heavy regulation, re-designing how smartphones work, and completely rebuilding the advertising industry, and the many economies that are built on that industry (apps being the most obvious, but many, many other businesses are dependent on tracking, even if they don't use the data themselves).

 

/rant

Posted

On the other hand, people have known for a long time that smoking is very detrimental for your general health and is a cancer hazard, and we’ve sort of learned from that and put laws in place to make sure less and less people start, or keep, smoking. But yeah then those nicotine bags came along…

 

my point being, these warnings crop up from time to time and it doesn’t mean that everyone needs to stop using phones, but rather that the providers need to rethink and redesign to ensure more privacy. But then they come up with a new fancy app and they upend most of it. 
 

Money.

Posted

It's pretty silly to warn us about location tracking when other data would seem to be more interesting. Like, I've never heard of a case where porn viewing preferences has been revealed.

 

The internet, when first invented, was to share computing power between universities. It was designed to be an open interface. Decades later here we are with computers and phones exchanging information with an  interface that was never intended to be private. But through decades of development, some security has been added.

 

Google knows more about me than I do. Who cares.

 

 

 

 

Posted
5 hours ago, The Documentary Sound Guy said:

It's a bit rich for this warning to be coming from the NSA of all places.  Especially when that warning does nothing but rehash information that has been publicly known for years and which has been largely greeted with a collective public shrug....

 

I agree, but in this instance it looks like some guy who writes for Forbes.com for very little money pumping up his headline. From his article:

 

"NSA’s warning comes by way of an advisory it last updated in 2000. But it’s still live and it’s clearly still relevant."

 

So while the stories are interesting, the NSA bit is not exactly breaking news... 

 

Posted
17 hours ago, The Documentary Sound Guy said:

Guess I fell for the clickbait headline?  I also misread the article and thought it said that the NSA had updated an advisory from 2000.  An article referencing a 25 year old NSA advisory (pre-dating 9/11!) seems ... odd.

 

I too checked out the article (after googling for "NSA iPhone tracking" and finding pretty much nothing. But bonus "WTF Forbes.com writer?": The NSA article he links to says it was updated in August 2020 and it references research from 2020...So I don't think the NSA got that wrong. 🙄

 

The NSA article from 2020:

https://media.defense.gov/2020/Aug/04/2002469874/-1/-1/0/CSI_LIMITING_LOCATION_DATA_EXPOSURE_FINAL.PDF

 

Anyway, I've been hanging with some investigative journalists... Those people take this stuff seriously. Two good places they've pointed me to (with both having updated guides since I last looked):

 

The 2025 journalist’s digital security checklist

Freedom of the Press Foundation

https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/journalists-digital-security-checklist/

 

SURVEILLANCE SELF-DEFENSE Tool Guides from EFF

Electronic Frontier Foundation 

https://ssd.eff.org/module-categories/tool-guides

 

@mono, thanks for the links. Always good to be reminded that it's worth taking this stuff seriously

Posted

When flying, especially internationally, I recommend taking two mobile phones one for you to keep under wraps while going through security and a dumb phone for showing to TSA. It works. 

Oh, and use a VPN, of course. 

Posted

Is there a real reason to be paranoid about this “tracking” stuff? I mean, it’s (as far as I understand) just so they can spam you with “relevant” stuff, like what kind of restaurants you usually seem to be into. Or what you usually buy online.

 

And assuming you’re not doing anything illegal, why would “they” care about you specifically among five billion other cell phone users…?

 

Also, modern phones (at least iPhones) have full end to end encryption that not even Apple can access. 
 

OK hit me with the conspiracy theories lol

Posted

The two big ones are identity theft and targeted harassment.  Both are results of databases falling into the wrong hands more so than specific abuses of what the information is supposed to be collected for.

I suppose you could add advertising fraud on top, but consumers aren't the victim of that particular outcome.

For me, it's not so much about personal fears as it is about what world do I want to live in, and do I want that world to include mass surveillance.  I don't care if it's benign, or appears benign right now.  I'm deeply concerned for the potential abuses of the nature that are imagined in books like 1984, some of which get a lot more tangible if you end up on the wrong side of government bureaucracy (sharing a name with someone who ends up on a no-fly list, for example).

Something like China's "social credit" system, where access to credit and social perks is gamified based on how good a citizen you are, as judged by your online persona, scares the bejeezus out of me, and our "free-market" version isn't so far removed, IMO.

Posted

+100, TDSG.

 

Plus, as soon as the 4th amendment doesn't matter to an individual because, hey, I'm not doing anything illegal, that is when tyranny gets a foothold. 

 

I'm not paranoid but the people watching me are. 

 

We should all exercise our 1st, 4th and 5th amendment rights daily. Too bad my wife doesn't recognize my rights when the Amazon guy leaves a big order for me at the door. 

Posted

 

Feel like in parallel with film making, knowing the old ways of pre-digital is good to practice even with the advanced use of digital.  Usually  only activate "tracking while using" myself . Always a give and take on how much data we provide , but a solid update of information from the article. 

 

Data brokering is a wild concept to come to fruition .  Companies create AI avatars of us to market our data back against us. Will use a dumb-phone on days off just to not have to exist in a marketing eco system.  

 

Recently read Foolproof by Sander Van Der Linden. Algorithms know us at 75 social media likes as well as our friends do with 75% success rate. 150 for family. 300 for spouse.  The book itself is about the past ten years of how data is  used and how to spot misinformation.  Solid read.

 

Posted

Posted today after 11.47am ...

 

And assuming you’re not doing anything illegal, why would “they” care about you specifically among five billion other cell phone users…? "

Plus, as soon as the 4th amendment doesn't matter to an individual because, hey, I'm not doing anything illegal, that is when tyranny gets a foothold. "

 

...

 

And what about when one starts doing something illegal, ... like having a sex change?

 

Posted

https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7433478

 

This article describes how location tracking collected by vehicles was used to set insurance rates.  It also notes that, once it became public, GM stopped selling the data to insurance agents, but I'd say that's a fairly clear-cut example of ways that location tracking can affect you directly.

 

I'm glad I live in a place with no-fault insurance.

Posted

TDSG, I hope you don't mind me abbreviating your handle. My stubby fat Belgium sausage fingers don't type well, 

 

Three weeks ago my wife's parked car was hit by the neighbour. Police investigated, asserted that a police report was warranted as the damage would be over $4k. 

 

The insurance companies talked and said they can just handle it as no fault and we could get the car repaired. I further asked our agent if we went that route would our premiums go up. She said likely yes. What the heck? 

 

I said no. You, as my agent, get the driver's insurance company to pay. This isn't going on out record. She said she could but it could be repaired sooner if we just went no fault. Jeez, no. Make them pay. 

 

I hope your "no fault" insurance works better than ours. 

 

Posted

As far as I know it does.  I haven't had to claim since they mandated no-fault.

It's also a government run monopoly, and our premiums went down about 40% when they instituted no-fault.  Put a lot of lawyers out of business, and everyone else pays less.

Before no-fault, I have had claims (a theft and a hit-and-run) that did not impact my premiums because they were not my fault.  I'd imagine it still works that way.

Tickets and at-fault accidents still negatively impact my insurance (I get a ~40% discount for having a clean driving record).

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