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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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
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.
Hard to connect these dots for most “normal” folks without feeling like a conspiracy nut. Appreciate this journalism.
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
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.
“I got nothing to hide. I’m a boring person” dumbass mfers
“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…
I’m willing to be 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.
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 🤦🏻♂️
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Whatever happened to that Edward Snowden loser?
loserheroBecame a Russian house cat
Obama should have droned him when he had a chance.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
🤯imagine how much they spent only to to terrorise women
