Is posting such baity non-journalism on here nowadays a way to farm karma?
This doesn't give anyone actual value, most of the things listed are common sense and if you use Google Maps, you are probably already aware of it. I'd wager that some people use Maps exactly because these features make it convenient.
Yes the fact that I can check my phone in the morning for my commute and get an accurate (ish) bus time including delays is great, I can avoid a long wait for a bus at and have another cup of coffee.
Though as I live next door to a pub in my village it used to keep checking me in - google probably thinks I have a drinking problem :-)
While this article might look obvious to you, most people will be surprised by what they read. We need more articles like this, so that everybody realizes how their data is used, processed, farmed, and sold.
None of the other commenters show surprise about any of it. This is just another generic unfruitful "google bad" circlejerk thread, no one learned anything new from it.
Sorry, I don't mean to argue with you, I just disagreed with the "accusation" against meibo.
Vice.com - get ready to get bombarded by popups and the website randomly jumping around while you’re trying to read a click-baity numbered list of trivial facts.
It appears they collect much of the same data, but likely less of it because of their smaller scale and inability to cross-tabulate this data with other user activity (like Google search): https://legal.here.com/en-gb/privacy/here-wego-here-applicat...
Here Maps has the Facebook SDK embedded in the app that pings Facebook upon every opening of the app (sending a persistent ID, IP address and device fingerprint including language, phone make/model and mobile carrier).
The last point (that there are alternatives but they’re all not as good) is why anti-trust action against Google/Alphabet can’t come soon enough. The acquisition of so many competitors should have been blocked by the FCC.
To be fair, most of the time users' are consenting to this. If you disregard the opportunity to read the privacy policy and just click "I agree", you really can't be too surprised at what information you allow these apps to access.
I'd suspect mostly every human on earth is in some database somewhere, and that will become a normal facet of life. Even the second you're born a record is made, as well as the rough time of your death (I'd admit we can't exactly epoch that just yet, but maybe soon we'll have that level of accuracy).
Nowadays you need to accept an EULA even just to open a OEM-provided Calculator application. Most people will - justifiably or not - ignore their actual content for they are meaningless to them and have never caused direct harm to most. Were I to spend time reading all the privacy policies and similiar legalese documents, I wouldn't get work done and be left with uncertainty either way, since most policies often cover more legal grounds and scenarii than those relevant and pertaining at the time, for convenience, too. More awareness that your consent is often given for dubious practices would maybe help, but that is not where a "privacy revolution" would begin.
At least Europe has made progress and prohibits the "it's in our 20 pages privacy statement" approach. The user must be explicitly informed and then provide consent. If it's unclear what you're consenting to, the consent isn't valid.
You selected the US region according to the URL. But the point isn't that they can't have this privacy statement. The point is that it doesn't provide them the right to use your data.
Tired of opening maps and getting a prompt to turn on 'make location bettter' every fuckingtime. Are the people working at Google that dumb? How many times do I have to decline.
Other than that, the article is one of the most clickbaity one I've read
Almost definitely so. Like Youtube telling my epxerience will be 'better' if I login, each time again. But it won't (well, apart from me not to having to click the button each time). How low can you go as a company?
Way way lower if you actually look at ISPs and media outlets like Vice. Did you see the amount of tracker shit that side loads up? They spray your private data not only to Google, but tens of other companies as well.
My annoyance gets bigger and bigger and I see myself more and more often saying, never mind! And being left with a bad feeling. Soon I will just stop clicking yt links and find alternatives.
Can always try to look for ways around first. Invidition (Firefox plugin to make use of
Invidious automatically when seeing Youtube links) worked ok-ish for a while for me, lately less so.
What really got me mad was when these jerks tied saved places to enabling location history.
I used google maps as a sort of address book starring the homes of friends, family, work locations, interesting places, etc. One day I turned off all the tracking and location history crap and had zero issues. Then one day I couldn't see any of my saved locations. What? I did some research and found out that a recent update now requires you to enable location history. WTF! Their brain damaged logic is the location you saved was done in the past so it stands to reason that it's part of history! Of course that's not really the reason, the reason is to force people to turn location history back on.
One of the most disappointing changes in Android recently is that any network-assisted geolocation plugins must now be installed as a system app, not a user app. That means that even if you use LineageOS where most Google stuff has been stripped out, getting a GPS fix through network assistance still sends data to Google servers. Only a tiny minority of users are comfortable working with the command line and will install e.g. Mozilla geolocation to the right place on disk. Just one of many changes Google has pushed into AOSP that end up strengthening its own monopoly.
No, the LineageOS devs say that their project does not aim to completely de-Google the OS, only remove Google Play Services and some Google applications like Maps. Thus, geolocation, DNS and login portal detection in LineageOS still use Google's servers.
To be fair, lineage+microg is probably the best you can get while still keeping a reasonable level of convenience (that is, still running android and most popular apps).
You are literally on a phone that was/is heavily subsidized by Google. They hold all the keys and own all the doors, if you want to degoogle, go Purism/Pinephone/Linuxphone.
He gives regular status updates and they seem to be making good progress. I played with /e/OS a long time ago when it first came out and found the microg integration to be excellent (have had trouble in the past getting LineageOS + microg to work...). I am planning to flash /e/OS onto a phone again soon to see the latest progress.
And i think its for the best.
This ROM is a joke: outdated, the store is full of outdated or non-original apps. Its a lack of respect for their users to market a device as secure with an unencrypted ROM with bootloader unlocked
OK, but it's weird to blame Google for Lineage's philosophical position. As it stands Google has contributed to LineagoOS far far more non-Googlr-dependent stuff than Lineage has.
I am pretty sure MicroG Lineage builds have NLPs other than Google's own preinstalled and being prerooted (or easily rooted with the extra zip) should be easily interchangeable from their settings. Though this is mostly an annoyance since an user installing Lineage should already be a little comfortable with adb and a terminal, it seems another sad step towards locking down Android furthermore.
I always deactivate geolocation and I assume and hope it doesn't phone home to Google in that case. I still deactivate network if I don't need it. Android devices cannot really be trusted and it seems to be getting worse.
Of course I am not using contact tracing either in this case, but I certainly won't allow Google to trace my location.
Sadly yes. It is probably a software component problem that bluetooth is bundled with location services, but without the separation from GPS, I have serious concerns about privacy, even if I think that I only use well behaved apps.
Bluetooth and location services being bundled is a policy decision by Google. If one has a database filled with historical correlations between bluetooth devices "in range" and GPS coordinates, it is possible to get a pretty accurate fix on someone's location from the current devices that are in range. This is the reason why Google has bundled Bluetooth and GPS in one permission.
Of course, the very fact that these permissions are bundled is the reason why it's feasible to keep such databases up-to-date, and why up-to-date databases provide a continuously stronger case why Bluetooth should be considered a type of location permission..
It would be totally possible to separate location permissions between "passive" location (e.g. triangulation through received GPS coordinates), and "active" location, e.g. inference of location through indirect measures and correlations with historical databases.
Afaik it's now a system-wide setting to disallow said correlations, but offering app developers more fine-grained control would be better for all of us. Why does, for example, my Sony Bluetooth headset need my location just for updating some firmware..
It's practical and also Apple does, but it's confusing for most users. I wish both platform explaining why it's bundled on the screen. Maybe create a permission only able to connect specific OUI would be a solution?
On a Pixel 4 with android 11 I was able to run the covid contact tracing app without location services. If I turn off bluetooth a notification appears that says exposure notifications is inactive until bluetooth is turned back on.
Even if you disable geolocation, Google can learn your location via Wifi/Access points nearby easily. It should be easy to cross references you (geolocation disabled) and others (one of them enabled geolocation) in the same network for Google.
> Google retains a detailed map of known Wi-Fi networks and access points. By knowing the exact location of these networks, and your proximity to them, its location services can gauge your location with roughly 30 feet of accuracy. [0]
Using cell tower and wifi location actually made my location much less accurate when I was living in SF. Rideshares would pull up to the wrong side of the street where the cell tower was, and immediately get kicked out and ditch me because it was a high use bus stop. When driving myself I would pop several streets over every time a new office tower came into line of sight. When near the beach, my location would fix to some cafe half a mile away with its wifi power up too high.
They could have surrendered that info, and helped tracing covid infected persons, but that would risk there monopoly for lives, so bad business strategy.
It's sad we got the the point the customers are afraid their devices are selling them this badly, because you can't even tell if your settings have the effect you think they should have.
I don't agree. The information is there, even the YouTube algorithm (the last part of my life that isn't deggogled) is recommending me degoogling videos!
People just don't care enough, even among my fellow geeks I had to "battle" to get them to install Signal because I couldn't use WhatsApp anymore.
We are bombarded with news about revolting situations and at one point there's so much outrage one can take. So the Evil Big tech spying is very low on the list of most people especially since they don't see the damage.
Do you know how to disable network assisted geolocation on Android 10? I have Lineage OS based on that version and neither following the guide for Android 11 nor for Android 9 makes the option show up, and the guide for Android 10 somehow doesn't exist. Maybe it's disabled because I don't have gapps?
https://microg.org/ has implemented a pluggable network location provider service. If you flash MicroG on your device, you can then select Mozilla (or Apple or other) location backend providers.
> getting a GPS fix through network assistance still sends data to Google servers
Well, that's not a GPS fix.
If you want a traceless position fix, use GPS Navstar / Glonass / Beidu / Galileo. Yes it takes longer from cold start, but that's the trade-off for privacy.
What is the case when you install LineageOS without google services? In my understanding, this takes care of the location provider problem. Of course you still have lots of google in your phone, which is the whole reason of the /e/ foundation for example.
I have a Huawei without Google, and I can do geolocation, maybe you could try that too ? If you use google for search and huawei for map, they can't cross reference to each other since they're forbidden to talk to each others.
I actually feel so much better without all the google stuff, weird no?
> I have a Huawei without Google, and I can do geolocation, maybe you could try that too ?
I assume that even if Huawei’s Android sold in the West doesn't use Google Play Services, it still uses standard AOSP, and the issue is that Google geolocation (and some other use of Google servers) is hardcoded into AOSP.
Private DNS (DNS over TLS) also sends metrics to a Google endpoint on every network change, as a way to detect connectivity. AOSP is truly a surveillance software.
Chrome used to have this neat little "helper" hidden in src/net/dns/host_resolver_impl.cc that would just by coincidence call hardcoded 8.8.8.8 every time DNS reply didnt contain A record, all behind the guise of "helping resolve navigation errors". Propagated to all other browsers using same codebase.
I invite you to try iodéOS, where they stripped out Google's DNS & SUPL servers, and allow you to directly select the location module of your choice ..
Be aware that downloading the GPS almanak, which is how AGPS gets a quick GPS fix when the device has been offline, does not necessarily reveal your location to anyone.
Another worst thing about android is giving carte blanche to apps for accessing messages. Most of apps these days use OTP to validate phone number. To read OTP message automatically, they ask permission to access text-messages. I knew few of such apps who keep polling user's text-messages to server daily without user's knowledge.
Are all those issues valid on an iPhone as well or does Apple limit it‘s privacy evading features?
Edit: Done. Deleted it.
Now if only I had an alternative to Garmin Connect. Love my fitness watch (Garmin Fenix), but hate the way they collect data about me. And no alternative.
Apple Maps of course collects a lot of the exact same data (make sure you double check their settings. But you could always disable location history for Google Maps as well.)
Last I checked Google didn't sell data to anyone either. I'm also interested in the claim that Apple Maps collects less data in this respect - they both report your current location for traffic analysis and have your day-to-day movement option available (the same that powers Find My Friends on iOS).
Are you sure you're just not rationalizing Apples collection? It's kinda important to be realistic when it comes to privacy and not be mislead by loud marketing.
The only data I know of that they sell directly is to NSA where they provide access to data and get money for it. They are largely compelled to do this though and I expect anyone in the US with data would be forced to as well.
Interestingly since google could deanonymize if they wanted, I wonder if nowadays NSA is just sucking in all our profiles from google and then deanonymizing to have de facto profiles on every human on the planet.
On iPhone your location history (they call it Significant Locations) is "end-to-end encrypted and cannot be read be Apple".
There's still the "Product Improvement > Routing and Traffic" toggle (enabled by default) but I'd be surprised if this isn't anonymized and/or scrubbed frequently.
HERE maps are quite good and allow you to download maps on to your device (maybe they all offer that?). I used it when driving from London to Edinburgh.
> Are all those issues valid on an iPhone as well or does Apple limit it‘s privacy evading features?
Most of them are valid on iOS as well, however if you go to Settings > Google Maps > Location and pick “While Using the App”, Google will only be able to track your location while you have the application open, so they can’t track everywhere you go as described in #3.
I did this but it’s annoying because there are limited features with it off. And Maps bugs me every time to turn it off, there’s no way for me to decline forever or note my preference.
So it’s like having pop up ads.
The limited functionality is also frustrating as you can’t even save locations with search history turned off.
Google Maps product designers don’t care about good UX, they care about collecting data from users. They explicitly design bad interfaces into their products to drive behavior.
IPV4 geolocation is based on maintained databases (e.g. Ma Mind) that usually are city or street accurate.
The popular rhetoric that having an IP is having the location is most often wrong unless Your users have static IPs registered to them. The way law enforcement does it is by subpoening the owner of the IP of pointing to the user associated with the IP at specific time but that still is prone to errors because of NATs - many distinct clients behind a single address.
All in all fingerprinting is using IPs pretty rarely nowadays.
There's a setting hidden away in android allowing apps to scan local wifi/bluetooth networks even when wifi is turned "off". Enabled by default of course.
If other devices in your network send data to Google, the network is uniquely identifiable by Google, no matter what individual devices of guests etc. do.
Behind a CGNAT, which most mobiles devices are, makes that point fairly moot. When I look up "my ip" on the phone it's always in a capital city 6 hours away.
There are only three mobile carriers in the US, which means at most three organizations controlling the CGNATs. I can assure you that they are selling the reverse port-to-user mapping to the highest bidders.
Don't know much about US carriers apart from brief interactions but I thought it was clear they were selling that data to 3rd parties for years and then got Government blessing to do it after being called out?
Seems insane to me, it's one of those thing you take for granted elsewhere, yeah of course my mobile ISP knows my location, as does the govt if they ask the ISP in an email, that's fine. (Quite sure most carriers have no qualms just handing it over on request)
But just selling that info for cents to any third party seems so utterly egregious and a massive betrayal of consumer trust.
Phones actually use push services (Googles FCM and Apples APNS among others) to get notifications. They don't really "check email" like your desktop PC does with a cron job.
Having said that, both Apple APNS and Google FCM do send regular heartbeat to their respective servers which make your positional tracking possible by both companies.
Not just your current location, but where you've been and where you will be going. If you are traveling, moving, changing jobs, etc, you probably had some interaction via emails.
If you had access to a significant portion of a country/world's emails, imagine the power you truly have.
How about all the data which map apps are asking for now (and in the past but for which they now have permissions):
- WiFi network access (tightened up in recent mobile OS') which can give you a pretty accurate location
- Photo roll (think of all that EXIF location data if you're giving photo roll access to leave images for reviews)
- Calendar/location integration (who else is scheduled to go to that meeting on your calendar which you're directing yourself to via your maps app)
- Bluetooth for all the BTLE beacons you're walking past in stores etc which have been gifted them for free from tracking companies
I'm not taking a moral standpoint here on whether it's right to collect this data, just pointing out that there's an order of magnitude more than the article describes.
Is there another way? This form of crowd sourcing data is how you are able to know when your next bus or train arrives.
But what is the alternative?
Should the concerned government body take it up? Your government releases a Maps application and asks citizens to use that...People are still going to have privacy concerns with that!
Or we simply decide to wait for the next bus and not bother to know when it arrives. Go back to a laid back life? Many mortals think that is a good idea, and, that is OK.
Like it or not, privacy is a problem of our civilization. Privacy problems are not going to go away. It up to the kingdom of humanity to live in good faith...But I have faith we might figure this out one day. Just not today...
> Or we simply decide to wait for the next bus and not bother to know when it arrives. Go back to a laid back life? Many mortals think that is a good idea, and, that is OK.
I'm one of those mortals; my data connection is disabled on the phone and used only for emergencies (last time I've used it was months ago).
Ultimately it fits in the big picture of the connected life. One can still live disconnected, and pay 10% of the "convenience price", but save 100% of the associated problems.
I don't blame the connected lifestyle but the more I think about it, the more it looks like an addiction to me, and the big companies are capitalizing on it. I don't agree with them, but I can hardly blame them - it takes one tap to switch the connection off.
> Is there another way? This form of crowd sourcing data is how you are able to know when your next bus or train arrives.
A standard format for public transportation schedules exists, and many municipalities already provide that format to the public so that map-app developers can show public-transit details. So, people can find out when their next bus or train is going to arrive without giving up any of their own privacy.
I personally think it's great that I can lookup what I did two months ago thanks to Google services. I adblock and disable as much ad tracking as possible but I'm pretty happy with how useful google services are for my day to day errands. It reminds me of places I went two years ago that I couldn't remember without it.
I find it strange people complain about it, yet still use their services. That's hypocrisy right there as well as a deeply unsettling conflict within.
Everyone is entitled to make their choice of what phone they buy.
The complaint is that there are few viable alternatives. Whenever one does arise, Google or another tech behemoth buys it, eg Waze.
Trust me, I am aware of the conflict. I hate Google with a passion, yet I still use some of their services. I feel sick doing it, but sometimes the convenience is worth my nausea.
This contradiction is your problem, not Googles. They will continue to make money off you and me. The only difference is I don't get the nausea.
Until you show me something REALLY dodgy they're are doing, I'll keep using their services.
As I mentioned before, I'm aware they sell my behaviour as advertising data to companies. On my end I block as much advertising as possible so I find it's a useless strategy product teams pushing things onto me.
> Everyone is entitled to make their choice of what phone they buy.
Technology is becoming more capital-intensive MUCH more rapidly than the total amount of capital in the economy is growing. As a result, the economy can support fewer and fewer choices as time goes on.
We're already at the point where there are only one-and-a-half companies selling LTE modem chips. All the good phones use Qualcomm's chips. The only other producer is Realtek, whose chips are only used in (AFAICT) extremely low-end phones sold only in developing countries. Qualcomm can backdoor your phone's modem chip with total impunity. Perhaps they already have.
If this is a surprise to you, it shouldn't be. Phones (android or apple) are sugar-coated tracking devices. The point of them, is that they externalise the internal. They were planned to make your private information into a commodity.
It also shouldn't be a surprised that no action will taken against them. Corporations are the government.
Well, 'they' might even put up a show of pretence in "punishing" a corporation. But they will only do that once they know how they will achieve their plans anyway. And let's not forget that the media are corporations too - in their news shows, they will only present what's expedient.
Its a sad story, but until a majority of people are on board with the idea that corporations/media/government are different sides of the same beast, nothing will change. Government is slavery. You are (or should be) your own master. Self-sovereignty is what you need. If you ever wonder why we think "anarchy is chaos", its because to the government, it is! But to me, its just the beginning.
Of course. See iPhones having an active backdoor from the get go [1], NSA slides referring to Jobs as "Big Brother" and iPhone users as "zombies" [2], FSF's analysis of the iPhone and their conclusion that the iPhone is "exposing your whereabouts and providing ways for others to track you without your knowledge" [3], etc. etc.
Did you ever wonder about the discrepancy in tech that occurred at that time the first iPhone appeared? We were all using desktops or fairly clunky laptops. Then, out of nowhere, we have touchscreens, cameras, maps, etc AND the power of a desktop machine, in a device that's 1/20th the size! It was such a staggering leap! I think phones were technology that was so far ahead of what we were prepared for, we had no means of defence.
With regards to the aims of Apple, Google et al - yes I think they wanted to spy on us from the start. It has always been about better governance of the masses. Corporation owners think they own us - everything we are provided with is only done with a view for them to apply greater governance of us. Historically, it would have been expedient to use stories (religions) to do this, then debt, and now technology.
Bringing us to the present, if you ask me, the virus we are apparently experiencing, is just a pretext. It is just another story, that leverages us into a technocracy. They want to boot up a technocratic system that we will all live in from cradle to grave, unaware and unable to do anything about our circumstances. This has been planned since the 1930's - IBM shared work space with Technocracy Inc as it was known then.
We are spending our time online, shopping online, isolated, dependent on corporations for the news, our food, intermediating our experiences, etc. We are sold on the future, Elon's neural lace, augmented reality, smart metering/cities, etc. I'm not joking when I say it seems to me that these plans are so progressed, and everyone is so on board, that the human experiment must surely come to an end soon. It will be a great reset, but we're not going to like it.
In my memory this was a bit different though, or more nuanced at least. There was progress towards smartphones starting halfway the 90s, then somewhere around 2000 there was internet access and the first devices with mail/GPS maps etc came out. Then the first iPhone came, and indeed it was a big step, but cdefinitely not out of nowhere: most or all of the tech itself was already there. Just less polished and not always all of it in the same device.
We were all using desktops or fairly clunky laptops. Then, out of nowhere, we have touchscreens, cameras, maps, etc AND the power of a desktop machine, in a device that's 1/20th the size!
This wasn't all of a sudden. In 1999, I already had a Palm PDA with touchscreen, pen and handwriting recognition. Digital cameras also existed, but were limited by storage size and power efficiency. Handheld color screens were a commodity since the Gameboy Color in 1998, and had existed since the Atari Lynx in 1989.
All of those technologies already existed before the iPhone came along. The limiting factor, before 2005, was silicon (transistor) density and power draw, which also saw gradual increases (Moore's Law), not a leap. After 2005 or so, the processors became powerful enough to support a generic OS and that allowed all those technologies to be combined in a single device.
> Did you ever wonder about the discrepancy in tech that occurred at that time the first iPhone appeared? We were all using desktops or fairly clunky laptops. Then, out of nowhere, we have touchscreens, cameras, maps, etc AND the power of a desktop machine, in a device that's 1/20th the size! It was such a staggering leap!
I was around when it came out. There was no staggering leap. The first iPhone was nowhere near desktop power and the camera wasn’t meaningfully better than what was available in other high-end “feature phones” or the blackberry.
The major breakthrough was the real browser and the capacitive touchscreen. It didn’t even have an App Store.
Yes. They could add E2EE for all their products (including iCloud), but that wouldn't be acceptable because terrorists and illegal images.
Tim Apple is likely in bed with the NSA. For sure everything is backdoored and in 20/30 years time there will be some heroic Snowden type who'll leak what everyone has known but gets called a foil wearing conspiracist.
> Its a sad story, but until a majority of people are on board with the idea that corporations/media/government are different sides of the same beast, nothing will change. Government is slavery. You are (or should be) your own master. Self-sovereignty is what you need. If you ever wonder why we think "anarchy is chaos", its because to the government, it is! But to me, its just the beginning.
You went from 0 to 100 in half a second with that part of the comment.
You might want to elaborate on "self-sovereignty" and "anarchy" because everything I know and have read about human nature point out to the fact that they devolve into "might makes right". Or at some point something emerges to regulate things, let's call that thing "a state".
I did go from 0-100. Sorry - but I'm glad I caught your interest.
If we were on a desert island, and I were to ask you to give me 40% of your income/produce and take out loans from me to buy your hut and donkey, you would rightly refuse. If I and 5 others where to do the same, you might consent, but you wouldn't think it was right. The system we have though - that no one asked for or signed into - is a system people actually think this is right!! And they will fight to maintain it. It is a slavery system, where because the criminals are so far away, unperceived by most, and tv and schooling (owned by those criminals) tells them it is right, and everyone else is going along with the insanity, well, we say 'I guess that it is right, it's what humans are' etc. Justifying the unjustifiable.
'Self-sovereignty' to me, is being able to say that you are responsible for yourself, and to mean it. Try it in the mirror! If you are unconvinced, you are not sovereign. This is not to say you need to lord it over others - far from it. It's that you treat yourself as an individual, and are responsible for yourself and your actions. You get rid of the cognitive dissonance as you reason things out. But you need to go all the way.
Accepting the authority of any other over your own experience and judgement, is to have made a grave error of personal judgement. (I don't mean refusing to accept the worthy advise of your mechanic over what to do with your car btw.) I mean being told something and ignoring your own reasoning and accepting theirs. To a reasonable person, it should be possible for someone to share evidence and allow you to make up your mind and get your agreement if what is requested is reasonable. If it is unreasonable you should be able to refuse. But our system is entirely unreasonable. If you are in the US, did you agree to the constitution, to be an American citizen? Were you - a free man under God - invited to join this club? The system is about manipulation and covert use of force and fear. It has an appeal - it is comforting (and easier) to think that someone else has this - but in fact, only you do.
'Might makes right' in this system (a system I think it has been in place for 100s of years). At some point those with the might want not to fight, or be hassled, or even known. 'They' set up a system to train those it has subjugated that this situation is right (education). No, education is not about improving those that go through its system - as you may have noticed. It is about making the men that suit the system and play the game.
Individually, people are lovely and cannot conceive of the breadth of the scam and lie that they are living. We are happy joyful creatures, but we have been turned inside out. And the loss of privacy is another example. They cannot conceive that education is 15 years of mind moulding, that the health industry is about making them unwell, that the media is about keeping them uninformed, that science is religion masquerading as reason, etc. But there it is. If you look and do your own research - and you have to do your own research - you will see what I mean.
I think the opposite ie that every nice place in the world is destroyed by a well functioning hierarchy. Say Romania, where you had lots of small agriculture - when they joined the EU, big agra moves in and as part of the agricultural policies, small farms are converted to big ones, that follow the worst agricultural practise. This is by design. Where you had unique expressions, once the system is in place, what you have is well-ordered people and Starbucks. It is based in fear. It is not our natural state.
Hierarchies are not transparent. If you are in a corporation, do you know what you boss is aiming for? What his boss's targets are? None of them are accountable. They would fire others in a sec if it was expedient for them. The system itself, makes people act daily like conmen, thieves. It turns people inside out - to take care of others is to fail financially - look at nursing.
Hopelessly naive is right. I don't care. I only have to answer to myself, and my heart and intuition. I don't want to be a part of the ever-increasing dystopia we are creating for ourselves. I judge for myself what is 'good' and act accordingly. I think that at the end of this experience we judge ourselves and our actions here. Our time here might not be all we experience. (Yes, I think the materialistic expression of our lives is a lie too.) I hope I am able to say I took the time to understand myself, to find out what's right, to have taken some actions in that direction. And I don't mean giving to so-called charitable organisations!
> If you ever wonder why we think "anarchy is chaos", its because to the government, it is!
Meanwhile in places without functioning government things are rosy, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, the DRC, the CAR, Afghanistan outside of Kabul, rural parts of Nigeria, etc.
Places with functioning governments like Finland and New Zealand are hellholes.
Those 'backward' countries are hardly untouched by 'democracy' though, are they?
What does it mean that a prison is quiet? Is it that prisoners love their subservience? Or that there are well armed guards. For NZ, it is certainly slave mindedness - the belief is the goodness of government and the Queen is strong.
I personally don't mind about it. And also, credit card companies knew our location many years earlier. Technology benefits will come with this trade off.
I also miss the times when Microsoft asked us if we want to send them a bug report when an app crashed. Today they feel they can send all they want both ways.
So Google handed over info on 175k accounts in the last half of 2019 alone? It seems it's becoming common practice to routinely pull citizens data, without much of a warrant and without the target's knowledge. There used to be a thing called secrecy of correspondence, preventing governments from reading your letters. Now whenever your name lands on some clerk's desk, and he feels you might be hiding something, he just requests all your emails.
This is all necessary because of "terrorist & child porn", but in reality we got mass surveillance. Next up gonna be social scores, it's like total authoritarianism in the making.
Not only that, but here in Europe we've gotten laws lately where the ISPs and companies like Google are forced to retain data for just such requests. (This data retention is, of course, excluded from GDPR as well.)
I don't actually consider that a problem, in fact, it's a feature and not a bug.
You should assume your every interaction within the world is logged, your every tap, click, spoken and unspoken words. And act in accordance, there can a camera watching you, or a mic picking up your bigoted rant.
You can (I love miley cyrus) add fake data to your posts, misdirect AI tools, and throw them off the scent if you wish. You give them the information you want to (you should probably use your own router, DNS, VPN, other tools). Dinosaurs are awesome.
They can only store the data you're generating. Don't generate it? No data to access.
This is bad math but there’s 220 million “elligible” Americans (not too young, not too old); if we assume 85% cellphone/ tech penetration that represents 0.1% of all Americans a year on napkin bar math.
Liberty is not free. If you value it, then you're going to have to fight for it. Submission now leads to your descendants living in an oppressive dystopia.
The pressure should be on our governments to regulate the powerful (Google). Meanwhile we're happily electing people who have direct ties to Silicon Valley big tech and calling ourselves Resistance. It cuts both ways!
Without government help, the only way to fight the oppressive dystopia you talked about is by becoming Richard Stallman. And I value not living in a university office and having to use Lynx and pine.
I mean it's possible that they're alt account created on a whim rather than ones that represent actual people. Law enforcement could have requested information from about a few people who each created thousands of accounts, for example.
1) Please define 'fake account'. Does the fact that I have more than one Google account mean that some of them are 'fake'? What if I lie about or omit my government name?
2) When did people start losing their citizenship by breaking the law?
By fake I mean a throwaway account made for the sole purpose of criminal activity. A thousand accounts created by a single scammer do not deserve the same privacy as your personal email account.
"Without much of a warrant" doesn't make sense as a phrase. Either you have a warrant or you don't. You can take issue with the grounds for a warrant or the breadth, but that's up to a judge to determine. There's no sliding scale. It's binary - there is or is or not a warrant.
I personally don't care. My location data is anonimized anyway. And there are sensible reasons for why advertisers can target audiences by region/location. No advertiser can identify me personally. And if I must be shown ads, I choose relevant ads to the nonsense I saw 20 years ago (flashy banners saying I won $1M).
Right now, all iOS and Android phones assign you an id for advertisers. iOS is planning to get rid of this. So, while advertisers may not know (and really don't care about) your real name, they can build quite a profile of you.
It is very much not anonymized. It is trivially easy (albeit not cheap - around $10k/month) to buy access to mobile ad id data, draw a polygon around your house, and get all the “anonymous” ids. From there, you can see all other locations of those ids.
When they anonymize you, that just means they give you an is not linked to your phone number or account. It doesn’t mean someone can’t link it for you.
The best defense to this is to reset your ad id regularly. Or on iPhones, turn off ad personalization. I don’t know about Android.
The place where I currently work assigned me a gmail address, and I wanted to check them on my phone.
I was using k9 for my personal stuff, and wanted another app for the pro mails, so I pulled out the gmail app.
Just one step before finalizing the setup process, I realized that google was asking me to accept Google Play terms of service.
WTF?
It turns out the gmail app setup process does much more, google takes over your entire phone, binding the omniscient google account to it, and all apps using google sdk, the calendar, maps, etc.
I innocently wanted to check my work mails, and if I hadn't being cautious, I would have given my whole life to Google despite the fact I took great length to never do that (I don't have a personnal gmail/youtube account, I use an alternative app store, etc.)
Sneaky, and scary. There is no way regular users notice that.
I agree it's unfortunate you can't setup just one of their services. However, if you're not running a custom Android ROM that explicitly does not include any of Google's services then they could still collect whatever they want (from a technical perspective).
This is how fascism works. You don't own the data about you - Google does. So, whoever controls government can just ask Google for information about you. No warrant required.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 308 ms ] threadThis doesn't give anyone actual value, most of the things listed are common sense and if you use Google Maps, you are probably already aware of it. I'd wager that some people use Maps exactly because these features make it convenient.
Though as I live next door to a pub in my village it used to keep checking me in - google probably thinks I have a drinking problem :-)
Sorry, I don't mean to argue with you, I just disagreed with the "accusation" against meibo.
I'd suspect mostly every human on earth is in some database somewhere, and that will become a normal facet of life. Even the second you're born a record is made, as well as the rough time of your death (I'd admit we can't exactly epoch that just yet, but maybe soon we'll have that level of accuracy).
Yup.
(Note: I went through an EU country in their region picker, went to sitemap and this is the URL I got).
Other than that, the article is one of the most clickbaity one I've read
Can always try to look for ways around first. Invidition (Firefox plugin to make use of Invidious automatically when seeing Youtube links) worked ok-ish for a while for me, lately less so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RRhhewFqyw
I used google maps as a sort of address book starring the homes of friends, family, work locations, interesting places, etc. One day I turned off all the tracking and location history crap and had zero issues. Then one day I couldn't see any of my saved locations. What? I did some research and found out that a recent update now requires you to enable location history. WTF! Their brain damaged logic is the location you saved was done in the past so it stands to reason that it's part of history! Of course that's not really the reason, the reason is to force people to turn location history back on.
Bullet, meet foot.
Arguable worse than R, C, or Word.
"Gee, let's take the most frequently occurring letter in English usage, and bracket it with Web-significant non-text punctuation."
"e Foundation" will find them.
No idea on status/news.
https://e.foundation
He gives regular status updates and they seem to be making good progress. I played with /e/OS a long time ago when it first came out and found the microg integration to be excellent (have had trouble in the past getting LineageOS + microg to work...). I am planning to flash /e/OS onto a phone again soon to see the latest progress.
Of course I am not using contact tracing either in this case, but I certainly won't allow Google to trace my location.
Of course, the very fact that these permissions are bundled is the reason why it's feasible to keep such databases up-to-date, and why up-to-date databases provide a continuously stronger case why Bluetooth should be considered a type of location permission..
It would be totally possible to separate location permissions between "passive" location (e.g. triangulation through received GPS coordinates), and "active" location, e.g. inference of location through indirect measures and correlations with historical databases.
Afaik it's now a system-wide setting to disallow said correlations, but offering app developers more fine-grained control would be better for all of us. Why does, for example, my Sony Bluetooth headset need my location just for updating some firmware..
> Google retains a detailed map of known Wi-Fi networks and access points. By knowing the exact location of these networks, and your proximity to them, its location services can gauge your location with roughly 30 feet of accuracy. [0]
[0] https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/how-google-uses-wi-fi-n...
30 feet sounds like cell tower triangulation.
It's sad we got the the point the customers are afraid their devices are selling them this badly, because you can't even tell if your settings have the effect you think they should have.
OK the second thing was "but I can't do almost anything with it :D "
Google and the likes have made it very difficult for you to be even aware that was an option.
People just don't care enough, even among my fellow geeks I had to "battle" to get them to install Signal because I couldn't use WhatsApp anymore.
We are bombarded with news about revolting situations and at one point there's so much outrage one can take. So the Evil Big tech spying is very low on the list of most people especially since they don't see the damage.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3467281?hl=en
Well, that's not a GPS fix.
If you want a traceless position fix, use GPS Navstar / Glonass / Beidu / Galileo. Yes it takes longer from cold start, but that's the trade-off for privacy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS
I actually feel so much better without all the google stuff, weird no?
I assume that even if Huawei’s Android sold in the West doesn't use Google Play Services, it still uses standard AOSP, and the issue is that Google geolocation (and some other use of Google servers) is hardcoded into AOSP.
And even if the OS isn't spying, the apps you install can spy, albeit less effectively.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vivaldibrowser/comments/a23071/how_...
Looking it up now they rewrote this part of the browser, and either moved it somewhere else or obfuscated it better.
What about A-GPS MSA handling? [1]
[0] https://review.lineageos.org/c/LineageOS/android_frameworks_... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-GPS#Modes_of_operation
Are all those issues valid on an iPhone as well or does Apple limit it‘s privacy evading features?
Edit: Done. Deleted it.
Now if only I had an alternative to Garmin Connect. Love my fitness watch (Garmin Fenix), but hate the way they collect data about me. And no alternative.
Are you sure you're just not rationalizing Apples collection? It's kinda important to be realistic when it comes to privacy and not be mislead by loud marketing.
If they allow advertising based on constraints on that data, they are selling it, albeit indirectly.
The only data I know of that they sell directly is to NSA where they provide access to data and get money for it. They are largely compelled to do this though and I expect anyone in the US with data would be forced to as well.
Interestingly since google could deanonymize if they wanted, I wonder if nowadays NSA is just sucking in all our profiles from google and then deanonymizing to have de facto profiles on every human on the planet.
There's still the "Product Improvement > Routing and Traffic" toggle (enabled by default) but I'd be surprised if this isn't anonymized and/or scrubbed frequently.
Most of them are valid on iOS as well, however if you go to Settings > Google Maps > Location and pick “While Using the App”, Google will only be able to track your location while you have the application open, so they can’t track everywhere you go as described in #3.
And Mapy.cz is quite decent Maps replacement. Acctually better for outdoor activity like cycling and jogging.
You could just turn off location history in the settings.
So it’s like having pop up ads.
The limited functionality is also frustrating as you can’t even save locations with search history turned off.
Google Maps product designers don’t care about good UX, they care about collecting data from users. They explicitly design bad interfaces into their products to drive behavior.
The popular rhetoric that having an IP is having the location is most often wrong unless Your users have static IPs registered to them. The way law enforcement does it is by subpoening the owner of the IP of pointing to the user associated with the IP at specific time but that still is prone to errors because of NATs - many distinct clients behind a single address.
All in all fingerprinting is using IPs pretty rarely nowadays.
(Supposedly; I don't own an up-to-date Android device.)
2 settings, one for Wi-Fi scanning and one for Bluetooth
Your mileage may vary of course.
Seems insane to me, it's one of those thing you take for granted elsewhere, yeah of course my mobile ISP knows my location, as does the govt if they ask the ISP in an email, that's fine. (Quite sure most carriers have no qualms just handing it over on request)
But just selling that info for cents to any third party seems so utterly egregious and a massive betrayal of consumer trust.
Based on what evidence?
Having said that, both Apple APNS and Google FCM do send regular heartbeat to their respective servers which make your positional tracking possible by both companies.
I turned off mail sync, I only trigger it manually, so there is a way to avoid the constant checking.
If you had access to a significant portion of a country/world's emails, imagine the power you truly have.
- WiFi network access (tightened up in recent mobile OS') which can give you a pretty accurate location
- Photo roll (think of all that EXIF location data if you're giving photo roll access to leave images for reviews)
- Calendar/location integration (who else is scheduled to go to that meeting on your calendar which you're directing yourself to via your maps app)
- Bluetooth for all the BTLE beacons you're walking past in stores etc which have been gifted them for free from tracking companies
I'm not taking a moral standpoint here on whether it's right to collect this data, just pointing out that there's an order of magnitude more than the article describes.
But what is the alternative?
Should the concerned government body take it up? Your government releases a Maps application and asks citizens to use that...People are still going to have privacy concerns with that!
Or we simply decide to wait for the next bus and not bother to know when it arrives. Go back to a laid back life? Many mortals think that is a good idea, and, that is OK.
Like it or not, privacy is a problem of our civilization. Privacy problems are not going to go away. It up to the kingdom of humanity to live in good faith...But I have faith we might figure this out one day. Just not today...
I'm one of those mortals; my data connection is disabled on the phone and used only for emergencies (last time I've used it was months ago).
Ultimately it fits in the big picture of the connected life. One can still live disconnected, and pay 10% of the "convenience price", but save 100% of the associated problems.
I don't blame the connected lifestyle but the more I think about it, the more it looks like an addiction to me, and the big companies are capitalizing on it. I don't agree with them, but I can hardly blame them - it takes one tap to switch the connection off.
A standard format for public transportation schedules exists, and many municipalities already provide that format to the public so that map-app developers can show public-transit details. So, people can find out when their next bus or train is going to arrive without giving up any of their own privacy.
I personally think it's great that I can lookup what I did two months ago thanks to Google services. I adblock and disable as much ad tracking as possible but I'm pretty happy with how useful google services are for my day to day errands. It reminds me of places I went two years ago that I couldn't remember without it.
I find it strange people complain about it, yet still use their services. That's hypocrisy right there as well as a deeply unsettling conflict within.
Everyone is entitled to make their choice of what phone they buy.
Trust me, I am aware of the conflict. I hate Google with a passion, yet I still use some of their services. I feel sick doing it, but sometimes the convenience is worth my nausea.
This contradiction is your problem, not Googles. They will continue to make money off you and me. The only difference is I don't get the nausea.
Until you show me something REALLY dodgy they're are doing, I'll keep using their services.
As I mentioned before, I'm aware they sell my behaviour as advertising data to companies. On my end I block as much advertising as possible so I find it's a useless strategy product teams pushing things onto me.
Technology is becoming more capital-intensive MUCH more rapidly than the total amount of capital in the economy is growing. As a result, the economy can support fewer and fewer choices as time goes on.
We're already at the point where there are only one-and-a-half companies selling LTE modem chips. All the good phones use Qualcomm's chips. The only other producer is Realtek, whose chips are only used in (AFAICT) extremely low-end phones sold only in developing countries. Qualcomm can backdoor your phone's modem chip with total impunity. Perhaps they already have.
I don't think it's useful for an arguments point of view to speculate that a chipset company has already built in backdoors to their products.
Breathing is a requirement for life. Owning an android phone isn't.
It also shouldn't be a surprised that no action will taken against them. Corporations are the government.
Well, 'they' might even put up a show of pretence in "punishing" a corporation. But they will only do that once they know how they will achieve their plans anyway. And let's not forget that the media are corporations too - in their news shows, they will only present what's expedient.
Its a sad story, but until a majority of people are on board with the idea that corporations/media/government are different sides of the same beast, nothing will change. Government is slavery. You are (or should be) your own master. Self-sovereignty is what you need. If you ever wonder why we think "anarchy is chaos", its because to the government, it is! But to me, its just the beginning.
Are you seriously suggesting then when Apple launched the iPhone it was a plan to spy on you?
[1] http://www.cellphonedigest.net/news/2008/08/iphone_3g_has_a_...
[2] https://venturebeat.com/2013/09/09/nsa-calls-iphone-users-zo...
[3] https://news.softpedia.com/news/Apple-the-039-Warden-039-of-...
With regards to the aims of Apple, Google et al - yes I think they wanted to spy on us from the start. It has always been about better governance of the masses. Corporation owners think they own us - everything we are provided with is only done with a view for them to apply greater governance of us. Historically, it would have been expedient to use stories (religions) to do this, then debt, and now technology.
Bringing us to the present, if you ask me, the virus we are apparently experiencing, is just a pretext. It is just another story, that leverages us into a technocracy. They want to boot up a technocratic system that we will all live in from cradle to grave, unaware and unable to do anything about our circumstances. This has been planned since the 1930's - IBM shared work space with Technocracy Inc as it was known then.
We are spending our time online, shopping online, isolated, dependent on corporations for the news, our food, intermediating our experiences, etc. We are sold on the future, Elon's neural lace, augmented reality, smart metering/cities, etc. I'm not joking when I say it seems to me that these plans are so progressed, and everyone is so on board, that the human experiment must surely come to an end soon. It will be a great reset, but we're not going to like it.
PS Here's a good article from 2016: https://www.technocracy.news/global-smart-grid-technocracys-...
In my memory this was a bit different though, or more nuanced at least. There was progress towards smartphones starting halfway the 90s, then somewhere around 2000 there was internet access and the first devices with mail/GPS maps etc came out. Then the first iPhone came, and indeed it was a big step, but cdefinitely not out of nowhere: most or all of the tech itself was already there. Just less polished and not always all of it in the same device.
This wasn't all of a sudden. In 1999, I already had a Palm PDA with touchscreen, pen and handwriting recognition. Digital cameras also existed, but were limited by storage size and power efficiency. Handheld color screens were a commodity since the Gameboy Color in 1998, and had existed since the Atari Lynx in 1989.
All of those technologies already existed before the iPhone came along. The limiting factor, before 2005, was silicon (transistor) density and power draw, which also saw gradual increases (Moore's Law), not a leap. After 2005 or so, the processors became powerful enough to support a generic OS and that allowed all those technologies to be combined in a single device.
I was around when it came out. There was no staggering leap. The first iPhone was nowhere near desktop power and the camera wasn’t meaningfully better than what was available in other high-end “feature phones” or the blackberry.
The major breakthrough was the real browser and the capacitive touchscreen. It didn’t even have an App Store.
Tim Apple is likely in bed with the NSA. For sure everything is backdoored and in 20/30 years time there will be some heroic Snowden type who'll leak what everyone has known but gets called a foil wearing conspiracist.
Grapes are delicious.
You went from 0 to 100 in half a second with that part of the comment.
You might want to elaborate on "self-sovereignty" and "anarchy" because everything I know and have read about human nature point out to the fact that they devolve into "might makes right". Or at some point something emerges to regulate things, let's call that thing "a state".
If we were on a desert island, and I were to ask you to give me 40% of your income/produce and take out loans from me to buy your hut and donkey, you would rightly refuse. If I and 5 others where to do the same, you might consent, but you wouldn't think it was right. The system we have though - that no one asked for or signed into - is a system people actually think this is right!! And they will fight to maintain it. It is a slavery system, where because the criminals are so far away, unperceived by most, and tv and schooling (owned by those criminals) tells them it is right, and everyone else is going along with the insanity, well, we say 'I guess that it is right, it's what humans are' etc. Justifying the unjustifiable.
'Self-sovereignty' to me, is being able to say that you are responsible for yourself, and to mean it. Try it in the mirror! If you are unconvinced, you are not sovereign. This is not to say you need to lord it over others - far from it. It's that you treat yourself as an individual, and are responsible for yourself and your actions. You get rid of the cognitive dissonance as you reason things out. But you need to go all the way.
Accepting the authority of any other over your own experience and judgement, is to have made a grave error of personal judgement. (I don't mean refusing to accept the worthy advise of your mechanic over what to do with your car btw.) I mean being told something and ignoring your own reasoning and accepting theirs. To a reasonable person, it should be possible for someone to share evidence and allow you to make up your mind and get your agreement if what is requested is reasonable. If it is unreasonable you should be able to refuse. But our system is entirely unreasonable. If you are in the US, did you agree to the constitution, to be an American citizen? Were you - a free man under God - invited to join this club? The system is about manipulation and covert use of force and fear. It has an appeal - it is comforting (and easier) to think that someone else has this - but in fact, only you do.
'Might makes right' in this system (a system I think it has been in place for 100s of years). At some point those with the might want not to fight, or be hassled, or even known. 'They' set up a system to train those it has subjugated that this situation is right (education). No, education is not about improving those that go through its system - as you may have noticed. It is about making the men that suit the system and play the game.
Individually, people are lovely and cannot conceive of the breadth of the scam and lie that they are living. We are happy joyful creatures, but we have been turned inside out. And the loss of privacy is another example. They cannot conceive that education is 15 years of mind moulding, that the health industry is about making them unwell, that the media is about keeping them uninformed, that science is religion masquerading as reason, etc. But there it is. If you look and do your own research - and you have to do your own research - you will see what I mean.
All the best.
Every nice place in the world is one with a well functioning , transparent and accountable hierarchy.
Your "solution" doesn't scale to millions of people.
Hierarchies are not transparent. If you are in a corporation, do you know what you boss is aiming for? What his boss's targets are? None of them are accountable. They would fire others in a sec if it was expedient for them. The system itself, makes people act daily like conmen, thieves. It turns people inside out - to take care of others is to fail financially - look at nursing.
Hopelessly naive is right. I don't care. I only have to answer to myself, and my heart and intuition. I don't want to be a part of the ever-increasing dystopia we are creating for ourselves. I judge for myself what is 'good' and act accordingly. I think that at the end of this experience we judge ourselves and our actions here. Our time here might not be all we experience. (Yes, I think the materialistic expression of our lives is a lie too.) I hope I am able to say I took the time to understand myself, to find out what's right, to have taken some actions in that direction. And I don't mean giving to so-called charitable organisations!
Meanwhile in places without functioning government things are rosy, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, the DRC, the CAR, Afghanistan outside of Kabul, rural parts of Nigeria, etc.
Places with functioning governments like Finland and New Zealand are hellholes.
What does it mean that a prison is quiet? Is it that prisoners love their subservience? Or that there are well armed guards. For NZ, it is certainly slave mindedness - the belief is the goodness of government and the Queen is strong.
Technology benefits do not have to come with this trade off. The article points to a number of ways it doesn’t like allowing offline access.
We now have fullstack client and server side malware built-in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claria_Corporation
https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
So Google handed over info on 175k accounts in the last half of 2019 alone? It seems it's becoming common practice to routinely pull citizens data, without much of a warrant and without the target's knowledge. There used to be a thing called secrecy of correspondence, preventing governments from reading your letters. Now whenever your name lands on some clerk's desk, and he feels you might be hiding something, he just requests all your emails.
This is all necessary because of "terrorist & child porn", but in reality we got mass surveillance. Next up gonna be social scores, it's like total authoritarianism in the making.
You should assume your every interaction within the world is logged, your every tap, click, spoken and unspoken words. And act in accordance, there can a camera watching you, or a mic picking up your bigoted rant.
You can (I love miley cyrus) add fake data to your posts, misdirect AI tools, and throw them off the scent if you wish. You give them the information you want to (you should probably use your own router, DNS, VPN, other tools). Dinosaurs are awesome.
They can only store the data you're generating. Don't generate it? No data to access.
I live in Mexico and love Donald Trump.
This wastes your time and provides no value. Your fake data is insignificant noise compared to your real data signal.
> We Kill People Based On Metadata (Michael Hayden former NSA boss)
WTF? This makes me extremely uncomfortable for some reason. There was some hope in mind that Snowden was exaggerating but this is just insane.
It feels like liberty has failed. There's no other option but to give in and accept.
I submit to the overlords, but I'm not happy about this.
Maybe giving up on the "nobody must ever know", but maybe not in general?
There are still quite some steps from here to 1984, despite people dramatizing.
Without government help, the only way to fight the oppressive dystopia you talked about is by becoming Richard Stallman. And I value not living in a university office and having to use Lynx and pine.
Yes, there are options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone
So far they are using it for beamforming, but I think location tracking is also one of the advertised use cases.
2) When did people start losing their citizenship by breaking the law?
Right now, all iOS and Android phones assign you an id for advertisers. iOS is planning to get rid of this. So, while advertisers may not know (and really don't care about) your real name, they can build quite a profile of you.
In fact, if it helps the platform and allows for more relevant ads, I'm all for it.
Why else would a Nigerian prince be interested in you?
When they anonymize you, that just means they give you an is not linked to your phone number or account. It doesn’t mean someone can’t link it for you.
The best defense to this is to reset your ad id regularly. Or on iPhones, turn off ad personalization. I don’t know about Android.
Whats actually happening: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
I was using k9 for my personal stuff, and wanted another app for the pro mails, so I pulled out the gmail app.
Just one step before finalizing the setup process, I realized that google was asking me to accept Google Play terms of service.
WTF?
It turns out the gmail app setup process does much more, google takes over your entire phone, binding the omniscient google account to it, and all apps using google sdk, the calendar, maps, etc.
I innocently wanted to check my work mails, and if I hadn't being cautious, I would have given my whole life to Google despite the fact I took great length to never do that (I don't have a personnal gmail/youtube account, I use an alternative app store, etc.)
Sneaky, and scary. There is no way regular users notice that.