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.
Hard to connect these dots for most “normal” folks without feeling like a conspiracy nut. Appreciate this journalism.
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.
Or, you know, let the gov work for you, not against you, & fully expect people to get jailed if they thank 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.
Is a phone a basic necess[ity] for a normal life?
You can answer this yourself. Get rid of your phone and see. If you beleive it’s not a necessity, don’t say “yeah I could do these alternative things to get by”. Actually do it. I hope you’re not job-shopping
Yes, imho, and increasingly so.
In an environment where the vast majority has one people act like everyone has one (eg restaurants having qr links to menus).Even EU ruled as much (eg my company phone is my own personal device regardless of ownership & my privacy is protected differently than eg my work PC or laptop).
And even if this wasn’t the case, why would you need to opt out of having a mobile phone just to get basic privacy?
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.
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.
Don’t buy Apple?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The US Supreme Court has had an antagonistic relationship to the forth amd 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.
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
Better to leave your phone at home (or better, in the pocket of someone who lives in your house and takes the same daily path as you do) if you are doing something that’s currently illegal. Or in any situation where you are doing something legal that the cops are likely to break up.
The juror going home thing is terrifying but I don’t think the government would be after you for fulfilling your civic duty.
Start tracking politician phones. Oh look who paid a visit to the lobbyist house this week! That shit will get shut down real quick.
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
Lol next story over is this https://infosec.pub/post/19174603
Whatever happened to that Edward Snowden loser?
Became a Russian house cat
Obama should have droned him when he had a chance.
loserhero
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)
Average people were only “thinking” about it for as long as it remained in the news cycle. Once the new cycle moved on, so did they.
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.
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.
Some additional info based on their published material (screenshot below). The software gets its data from “publicly available sources” which includes tracking information from many different online advertisers, public social media posts, etc. As we know, the advertising data can sometimes have your personal info attached - sometimes not. Babel Street claims to anonymize the data, but let’s assume there is a $$ amount at which they won’t.
So, theoretically, if you can successfully avoid ad trackers, and you don’t post on social media platforms except where you want to be “seen”, you can avoid this tracking (granted that seems quite impossible these days).
If that’s true then a simple VPN and some social media opsec will work.
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 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?
Most of the population is choosing be enslaved by it. Buckle up.
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…
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.
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
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…
🤯imagine how much they spent only to to terrorise women
“I got nothing to hide. I’m a boring person” dumbass mfers
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 🤦🏻♂️
“why don’t you take your clothes off, then? You said you ‘have nothing to hide’, didn’t you?”
“Got nothing to hide” - Man wearing pants
I got nothing to hide.
I’m willing to bet that they have curtains on their bedroom window…
all because they’re afraid someone will laugh at their micro dick.
they not wrong tho, I be laughin at them regardless.
I’m willing to be they lock their doors
Looks like everyone should be getting these bags
Or just hit airplane mode / power off. Or just leave the phone at home, the procedure takes only 5-10 minutes.
People are way to attached to their phones. The world will not collapse in that hour, it is a survivable event, or so I hear from reputable sources.
airplane mode is on record not trustworthy.
it will not communicate outward, but it will scan for WiFi and BT APs, then report home once you’re back online.
even turning your phone off won’t help.
you need to remove the battery to be sure.
when I commit my “crimes” against “society” I just leave my phone at home.
“where were you on x night?” - at home
“what were you doing?” - jerking off to the thought of your intelligence guys listening to me beating off
“…”
Can you really trust airplane mode to ensure there is nothing going out. I agree people should just leave them at home, but these bags are like putting tape over your laptop camera. Just an extra peace of mind when going to the Dr.
I probably wouldn’t trust airplane mode, but I do believe power off is safe. There is no transmit capability in off correct?
But yeah, leaving phone at home is best knowing tracking sites like these exist.
I didn’t read the article, but wouldn’t the site see the phone as soon as it’s taken out of the bag? Unless the plan is to leave the phone in the bag the whole time, at which point it seems easier to just leave it behind.
Pretty much. Can’t see the rest of the article, but most likely it’s just tower data, which only gives a general location. But as soon as you pull your phone out and get messages you would be traceable. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a phone
I’ll admit I didn’t open the article, as far as I’m aware the best way to sidestep silly requirements like warrants is to just purchase data intended for advertising. Databrokers really have an amazing wealth of info ready to be tapped into, all you gotta do is pay.
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?
But that’s not a burner phone, that’s an off phone.
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.
Then how you gonna take a selfie in the bed?
Seriously tho, people need phones for everything, including their calendar and map and communication with their partner.
Not bringing a phone isn’t an option
Calendar
Non digital is sufficient. And if it must be digital for some reason, no you don’t specifically need to use a serf phone for that.
map
I get around just fine without proprietary tracking BS. Navit + Openstreetmaps pre-downloaded binary data + detachable USB GPS transceiver.
communication with partner
Softphones and SIP telephony are fine for this.
Sauce: I am a functioning adult who lives without a phone as a matter of principle.
Not bringing a phone definitely is an option.
But I suggested a burner with forwarding so that handles comms to partner.
If you can’t function without your main device for special circumstances such as this, I guess you just can’t be helped.
Believe it or not, digital cameras exist as standalone devices.
You can also buy an rf blocking bag for your phone.
Yes, you can. But thats the last thing on the mind of someone who is struggling to terminate a pregnancy in the US in 2024. We need something better.
Not having endless hedonistic recreational sex in the first place? Is it really that difficult to remain abstinent?
I can assure you that people don’t need instant access to calendars and maps. Smart phones are a convenience, not a necessity.
(Source - lived through the 80’s. Still alive to tell the tale)
“And fuck all the other people who are addicted to smarphones. They don’t matter” /s
No, they don’t. Because if they’re weak enough to allow themselves to become addicted to a device, that’s their problem to solve. Not even else’s.
Smartphones are a convince, a tool. Nothing more. If one can’t live without one- there’s a problem needing to be addressed.
if they’re weak enough to allow themselves to become addicted to a device
That’s not how addiction works.
There are alternatives to all of that. If you’re going to do potentially illegal acts, and you don’t want to rot in jail for the next however many decades until a scotus exists to set you free, take basic operational security into account and don’t bring the corporate tracking device that cops can freely tap into.
Yes. And we need laws that provide this protection to everyone by default.
That’s cute but to get those laws you have to vote third party and hope they don’t get killed or bribed before passing said law. I don’t see that happening until long after the US collapses, so in the meantime it makes more sense to understand how not to be a victim to a fascist government.
In the US, yes. But this is mainstream in countries with democracies.
Anyway, of course. Stein or West or youre voting for climate catastrophe, privacy erosion, and genocide.
The opposite, actually, they’re the only candidates, assuming you meant Stein and Claudia, that do not have any of that in their policies.
Mapquest is still around, so that solves one problem. The rest can be alleviated by communicating in person with your partner and aligning on a plan to not get tracked (like partner driving you and leaving their phone at home).
In the absence of that help, friends or family you trust. A cab? The clinic probably has a phone to hail a cab when you’re there.
Disclaimer: I’m just providing work arounds, I’m not saying they’re ideal.
The EFF have more 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.
