> Rather than begin applying for warrants, the government has circumvented the ruling in many cases, buying up GPS data from companies that consumers largely believe are tracking them purely for advertising purposes.
> “They’re buying data. That’s what they’re doing,” says Warren Davidson, a Republican congressperson from Ohio. “They’re structuring markets to collect the data and they’re circumventing the Fourth Amendment. We need to turn that off.”
This is also a big part of the problem, imo. It is too easy for apps to request a cocktail of permissions (including location data) when an app is installed; then users never revisit those permissions after the app is used once.
Meanwhile the app is constantly tracking users locations. And selling it to third parties, which sell it to gov’t orgs.
How can mobile devices be updated to make users more aware of these problems? Maybe iOS and Android can, once a month, pull up a dossier of you on an app-by-app basis or something.
Get ready for worse. Microsoft is not only forcing OEMs to put a proprietary Copilot key on their keyboards, but they’re about to make Copilot and its agent launch on startup by default. I’m sure all the data they suck up will find its way to invasive ads, data brokers, and the government.
Why does Microsoft hate it's users? Most of us pay for PCs with windows on them, and have upgraded to Windows 11 systems in the last couple years. Well I know I did last year, anyway. Well those who don't obviously choose to use something else.
Anyway Microsoft seems to just be making things less and less open, and less and less private as we go along. For some reason, they seem to want to just get rid of their entire userbase. However for a person with accessibility needs, it's hard to just up and switch to Linux.
In newer versions of Android, apps which are not opened by the user have their permissions automatically and periodically revoked. So they no longer have the permissions, and when reopened, the user needs to grant the permissions again interactively. Presumably to solve this.
Thats great but their is a boat load of permissions that Android allow that never require user acceptance and are never revoked. Total disablement when not used would be much better.
Damn I guess we shouldn't do any small step to improve society somewhat unless we can overhaul systems entirely all at once!
Personally, I'd prefer to see us fight for successively smaller and smaller blast radii than simply hoping and praying the blasts disappeared entirely.
Small steps get us things like pop ups on every webpage or TSA. You'll just slowly create a bureaucratic dystopia. We need giant sweeping reform of privacy laws in the US and a restoration of the 4th amendment.
Not in the context of the government buying the data, they'll just buy it from google instead of shadowgovt.databroker.com. It's a red herring, a feel good feature that just limit's googles competition and doesn't really change the information collected on us.
Unless you're somehow claiming that your browsing history was used to train an AI for identifying tanks or terror connections, in which case for the former that makes no sense and for the latter the data is so emulsified that it can't really be considered your data any more than you could lay claim to a cat recognizer that was trained on a billion cat photos, some of which happen to be from your blog.
(And that's even assuming one accepts the premise that Google's cache of browsing data was used to train the AI that the Israeli government is using. In reality, that information is deeply firewalled and doesn't see the light of day for other applications).
You're arguing in bad faith, making this about browser history, this is about data collection of the sensor array that is your smart phone device, two very different things. It's hilarious to claim that what google is doing by disabling app access matters at all when google created the problem and profits from it in a really shady way all the while pretending to be doing you a service by protecting you from those 'shady' apps (and 3rd party app stores like say.. f-droid). And then using that data to _literally_ kill people. I'm not saying those apps aren't shady, I'm saying google pretending to protect you is shady.
Sorry; I just don't follow. Google isn't "protecting" me from F-droid; I have it on my Android right now. Nor is Google using cellphone telemetry to kill people. Nor is Google (AFAIK; if there's evidence to the contrary I'd be interested to see it) providing cellphone data to nations that are targeting them for death (Google doesn't even own a cell tower deployment). Nor is geotargeting people based on cellphone data a system limited to Google's architecture; that's a feature of cellphones, because they're little radios we carry in our pockets that continuously broadcast to a mesh network in an attempt to allow connection to it.
I don't think I'm arguing in bad faith, but I am trying to argue with someone who seems to be operating from a source of facts I don't have access to. You seem to be upset that Google makes cellphones? What am I missing here?
>Sorry; I just don't follow. Google isn't "protecting" me from F-droid
Yes, they give you a warning to scare off normal users and you have to enable installing from 3rd party sources. My point isn't that they're "protecting" you at all, my point is it's security theater.
>Nor is Google (AFAIK; if there's evidence to the contrary I'd be interested to see it) providing cellphone data to nations that are targeting them for death
Various subsystems on android are controlled by Google and they enable Google to collect and consolidate all of the telemetry/usage data etc (effectively google is root on your phone).
This information is used to select targets and kill people:
"Since 2002, and routinely since 2009, the U.S. government has carried out deliberate and premeditated killings of suspected terrorists overseas. In some cases, including that of Anwar Al-Aulaqi, the targets were placed on “kill lists” maintained by the CIA and the Pentagon. According to news accounts, the targeted killing program has expanded to include “signature strikes” in which the government does not know the identity of individuals, but targets them based on “patterns” of behavior that have never been made public. The New York Times has reported that the government counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent."
You're not bringing much evidence to the table to single out Google for your frustration. Targeted tracking of individuals with cellphones is enabled by every cellphone, by virtue of the fact that it's a radio and signal strength and connection is logged and forwarded by the towers themselves; there's nothing special Google is doing to modify that process. So I don't know why we should focus on Google and not, say, T-Mobile or AT&T or TracFone or the entire cellular infrastructure.
You seem to be alleging that Google is brokering third-party access to data stored on the phone or generated by the phone (beyond the telemetry that's natural to every cellphone), but there's no evidence to support that hypothesis. Have I misunderstood what you're alleging?
Google's value in tracking is in providing services to users with the tracked data and (in the ads arm) linking advertisements to potential interested users (which is a system they broker internally).
They don't hand data to third-parties; third-parties hand data to Google, and Google might kick out answers to questions, but it does not kick out answers to questions like "Hey, is this person a terrorist?" There's no program for that. Hell, Google doesn't even kick out answers to questions like "Would Bob like to buy my shoes," the entire ad network is architected to minimize the ways an advertiser could glean the identity of a specific user who saw their ad.
My understanding (as an iPhone user) is that iOS has 1) a Location permission that a user has to grant to an app, and 2) a Background Refresh permission that’s required for apps to run when they aren’t in the foreground (+/- some grace period I think), and if these are enabled it should prevent apps from gathering this data - whether for advertising or just general fuckery.
Is this inaccurate? I would be very interested to know. Obv this won’t prevent Apple from tracking you, which is important if they are part of your threat model.
I'm on LineageOS, and not sure if it's a baseline android feature or not, but it does occasionally bring up a notification about which apps are using location access.
Phone bootloaders are rapidly becoming unavailable in the unlocked state due to Chinese laws that say bootloaders must be locked for their region. Pixels are the majority of the US general purpose computing market in the mobile form factor simply because they haven't unified their global product variants yet.
Naturally I don't think I care too much or I would care less. I believe I care an appropriate amount. Unstable leadership doesn't seem likely to provide stable software. I'm not going to invest time and energy learning something that could fall apart tomorrow.
I don't think everyone should take my approach but there are circumstances I deem extreme enough that it's worth mentioning so that other people can investigate and make informed decisions. I specifically didn't go into detail so that people who don't care don't have to think as much about it.
It shouldn't be. People need to bloody care about the nitty gritty. I'm tired of consumers and investors who know jack and shit about what it is people are leveraging their capital to do.
Think about how different the world could be if we shut off the spigot to companies that acted like asshats.
Sure, but I think "There is an asshat in an open-source project filling a needed spot in the mobile OS ecosystem is different than "Apple is funneling Chinese citizen communications to the CCCP" or "Google is helping the military develop facial-recognition killer drones".
Oh yeah, they don't want to get a warrant. I even saw something that said if congress doesn't reauthorize it, it will just keep going, because it can be recertified by the FISC. LOL couldn't remember what it was, but found it.
https://www.wired.com/story/section-702-vote-fails-trump-fis...
> “They’re buying data. That’s what they’re doing,” says Warren Davidson, a Republican congressperson from Ohio. “They’re structuring markets to collect the data and they’re circumventing the Fourth Amendment. We need to turn that off.”
This is also a big part of the problem, imo. It is too easy for apps to request a cocktail of permissions (including location data) when an app is installed; then users never revisit those permissions after the app is used once.
Meanwhile the app is constantly tracking users locations. And selling it to third parties, which sell it to gov’t orgs.
How can mobile devices be updated to make users more aware of these problems? Maybe iOS and Android can, once a month, pull up a dossier of you on an app-by-app basis or something.