this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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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.

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[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] Waldowal@lemmy.world 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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).

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[–] fubarx@lemmy.ml 13 points 4 days ago (10 children)

Apple and Google can fix the problem. Apps are required to ask for permission to access location information. Most of the time, it's for tracking and analytics, not anything related to the app's functionality. That's the data that is leaking to these data brokers.

In those cases, if asked, user can say no, but apps keep haranguing you until you capitulate.

Instead, the OS could add a button that says: "Yes, but randomize." After that, location data is returned as normal, but from totally random locations nearby. They could even spoof the data clustering algorithms and just pick some rando location and keep showing returns to them, or just trade the data from one random phone for another every N days.

You do this enough and the data will become polluted enough to become useless.

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[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 11 points 4 days ago

🤯imagine how much they spent only to to terrorise women

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