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.
How is this not a warrantless search?
It is, but the USA hasn’t cared since Snowden.
UNDERTALE???!?!?!??11
That’s the issue with the patriot act, they’ve been allowed to do warrantless searches for a long time now.
FISA court if they run into any friction
Because a carrier’s data on you is not your person or belongings. The companies holding this data are selling access to it, so it’s not being searched, it’s being offered.
In other words, the same reason as why they don’t need a search warrant if there’s a breaking and the business across the street volunteers their security camera footage, even if you’re on that footage.
Courts have actually said that looking back at someone’s location data counts as a search and requires a warrant. There’s currently a lawsuit recently filed by the institute for justice aledging that the use of flock safety license plate readers is unconstitutional because it’s a warrantless search.
Start tracking politician phones. Oh look who paid a visit to the lobbyist house this week! That shit will get shut down real quick.
Lol next story over is this https://infosec.pub/post/19174603
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
If you don’t want any to be tracked legally, write/call/tweet/visit your representatives.
And donate to the EFF if you have the means because they can and have and will likely continue to lobby on average internet users behalf!
Ah yes, democracy is a healthy and fully functioning institution.
You just got confused who’s sponsoring it, that’s understandable.
I see your point. I have no illusions that democracy is healthy in modern times. Perhaps not ever? We don’t even live in a democracy any more, we live in a corporatocracy.
But doing nothing will solve nothing.
edited to add: In fact, it’s our complacency that our corporate masters depend on. Corporate news is designed to overwhelm you. Advertising is designed to lull you to sleep. Together, they make it seem like there’s nothing you can do. But that’s not true. You can do something. Maybe not the things I suggested, but something. It will make a difference, even if it only makes a small difference for a few people. Isn’t that better than nothing?
What else would you suggest to do about it?
Throw it down and bring real democracy like in Switzerland
Or throw it down and bring anarchism
None of these are realistic, so…
I sure wouldn’t vote for someone who met with lobbyists.
Do you?
All politicians meet with lobbyists. It’s hard to get a handle on the needs of the nation (or state, or so on), and lobbying is how people inform their representatives of that need. Now whether those lobbyists are scumbags or saints, that’s a different question.
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.
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.
Your survival kit:
Empty GrapheneOS Pixel 6a bought with cash that isn’t your daily driver (last Pixel with snapdragon chip that allows IMEI changes)
JMP.chat
Silent.link
Sensors off (developer options)
Bluetooth/WiFi/NFC off
Disable 2G/enable LTE only mode
Offline maps/airplane mode when navigating/at destination/anywhere near your residence or other frequently visited places that could be associated with you. When changing the IMEI/IMSI combo make sure you go to another location first so that you break the link
Infrared AND polarized license plate covers. Remove any and all bumper stickers and other accessories that can be fingerprinted
IR blocking lens sunglasses for facial recognition
And of course, it wouldn’t be complete without the tor browser over a trustworthy VPN
So yeah fuck the police
Edit: I forgot to mention that if you drive a car that is mid-2010s or newer you may have to do some digging to disable telemetry, satellite, cellular and any other dystoptian fuckery they install these days.
…Or just not taking a phone and taking public transport instead of a car.
But that’s so boringgg. And in the U.S public transport is pretty limited.
how does one change your imei number using a pixel 6a, with a rooted phone with magisk.
I may be wrong, but I don’t think root is required. Most of the methods in this article use the AT command.
Still can’t escape cell tower triangulation
They can triangulate the signal, but in this case it has absolutely no connection to you or your identity, so you don’t need to. Regularly changing esims (IMSI) and IMEI will effectively neuter triangulation. You’re just a random red dot with no name.
The IMEI can’t be changed. That’s the serial number of the cellular modem
Edit: reviewing the link you shared in another comment that looks plausible. Just be warned good luck on any kind of warranty or insurance claims if you change IMEIs. I used to work for a cell phone manufacturer and we used the IMEI to both identify roughly when the device was purchased to make determining warranty status dead simple, and to identify devices as they went through the repair process.
Additionally carriers will often blacklist IMEIs for activation (usually on devices which were financed but never paid off) so that’s another potential opportunity for trouble
Meh, the pixel 6a is pretty cheap. Warranty and creature comforts are for the daily driver.
Edit: I should add, there are a few mobile hotspots that officially support changing the IMEI
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 track 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?
Unfortunately yes, and I would go even a step further and say a smart phone is a basic necessity. More and more companies and even government services are operating on the assumption that everyone has a smart phone. I have encountered various services where if a person didn’t have a smart phone they literally can’t use it. I even have personal experience with it.
My landlord uses a company for payments that can only be interacted with via an app on a smart phone. There is no web portal option. There is no option to mail a check. There is no option to setup a direct bank transfer. I was essentially strong armed into it since the place itself was (and still is) better than almost anything else I saw and is a reasonable price.
Android virtual machine? Waydroid?
Are we talking about me specifically or people in general? I’ll assume general as I was just relaying a personal anecdote to show that my point/thesis wasn’t just a hypothetical as I do know how to get around it in my specific case.
In the general context, that’s not a great solution for most people as it is beyond their skill or time set. For the most disadvantaged people just having the ability to have a phone at all and a place to reliably charge it is an issue. There is also the issue is practicality. When I take public transit where I live, the app pulls up a QR code on my phone they gets scanned. I’m not even sure I could fit my laptop screen into the space to scan the QR code if I was emulating Android.
So I guess my thesis here is that systems should be made more accessible and inclusive rather than requiring those in the minority to either have to put more effort in using a workaround to reach functional parity or end up left out all together.
Fair points, misunderstood indeed.
I have encountered various services
For example, some of these services would be… ?
Gov agencies require 2 factor to a cell phone. Land lines dont work and VoIP lines with texting also don’t work. The only option is to use snail mail and have sensitive data sent via post office
If I were stuck in that position, then I would not hesitate to choose the postage method. That being an option does not comport with the assertion “if a person didn’t have a smart phone they literally can’t use it”.
I respect your stubbornness in that regard, but understand that in such a situation you’re putting yourself in a position of significant friction, possibly costing yourself income, promotions etc.
I learned very quickly by playing the game by the unofficial rules and expectations things are way easier and my quality of life is much improved. Stubbornness won’t change the system, but it will certainly annoy people and slow down your access to life, liberty and the persuit of happiness. If that’s a trade off you’re willing to make so be it, but personally I’d rather enjoy my life than die on hills that very few people so much as glance at.
Yes Boomer
I’m almost 50 myself, come on
Millennial, actually
Press X to doubt
A millennial not having a cell phone is such an unimaginable concept?
For whatever it’s worth, I do use SIP software telephony in order to make calls and receive texts, so in that way I do technically have a “phone”. But what I’m fundamentally rejecting here is the notion that I must be compelled to carry around a device in my pocket infested with proprietary malware.
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?
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
The above being a rhetorical question, I just wanted to take a temperature of the room.
I have lived without a phone pretty much all my adult life. The experiment for me would be to get a phone and see what changes. In that way, I have answered it for myself and the answer is a clear “you don’t need a phone”.
Yes, the impact on quality of life is just so significant that it’s a handicap to normal daily lives.
Considering nearly everything requires a phone number and also rejects VoIP numbers? Yes. A phone is required now to participate in society.
You and I must live in two different societies then. I work with at least two other individuals who also don’t have a cell phone (not just smart phone, but any cellular device), one of whom is also a millennial. My SIP number has never had any issues with online service auth.
We absolutely do the society I live in even the homeless have cell phones and I haven’t ran into anyone without one in decades
To be fair, I don’t go around in public telling everyone “I don’t have a cell phone btw”. So I suppose we are easy to miss.
Depends on where you are really. Small towns everything is cash or a phonecall to a person from any phone (it’s really like stepping back in time about 15 years) but in larger cities you might find yourself required to use an app to unlock your apartment or office door or buy a train ticket or pay for a parking space, or buy a bus ticket or hail a taxi. In work I’ve needed a phone for 2FA in my last 3 jobs (granted in IT that’s probably for the best) and in college they distribute resources on the school website via big in-person QR codes.
While every single one of those things almost always has a non-smartphone option, it increases friction significantly, and then you’re the annoying person who is slowing everything down by not doing something the way everyone else does, however in a workplace they’ll often simply provide you with a phone because that’s easier than going to the trouble of ensuring every edgecase is covered and ensuring fair compensation for requiring you to have a 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.
“The fourth amendment means what we say it means” – SCOTUS, probably.
Oh absolutely but it annoys them when they’re called out about it
The US Supreme Court has had an antagonistic relationship to the forth and 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.
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.
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.
Don’t buy Apple?
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.
Yeah, IOS and stock android are not acceptable if you care about this stuff
On graphene my bluetooth and wifi turn themselves OFF if I haven’t been connected for a few minutes
Maybe you need arch btw
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.
A Faraday cage is supposed to be grounded, so aluminum foil isn’t the same thing. Maybe you could turn the phone off, wrap it in foil, and then place it upon a conductive metal surface that is grounded, such as a 240v kitchen appliance
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.
I absolutely do not trust that an “off” phone is actually off, unless the battery is removed (assuming it can be).
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.
I don’t want to encourage paranoia here but “off” does not mean “off”. Modern phones are almost never actually “powered down”. If you’re paranoid, turning your phone off is not enough. Leave it behind.
(Also a gap in your phone’s location history can also be used against you, fwiw.)
Yeah, and Alexa/Siri/Google assistant don’t eavesdrop unless you use the magic words to activate them.
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.
Time for an alternative means of communication
Article link not requiring you to sign up: https://archive.ph/Th1Sq
ty 🙏🙏🙏
This is not new and it has previously been used against anti-abortion activists, tracking locations and even being used to record religious confessions. People on both sides of the abortion issue can oppose this type of monitoring.
Holy shit.
privacy is important, kids
Who else are they selling this too?
Whoever has money I suppose. Makes me wonder if there are laws regulating this sort or tech.
Hard to connect these dots for most “normal” folks without feeling like a conspiracy nut. Appreciate this journalism.
Whatever happened to that Edward Snowden loser?
loserheroBecame a Russian house cat
Obama should have droned him when he had a chance.
found the scourge
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.
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.
Yep. Spin up your own website and throw a couple YouTube ads out into the world. We’ll have legislation drafted making this illegal before your first server bill comes due.
Although we already know what would likely happen if someone did that. It would just be made illegal to track the locations of congresspeople (and only congresspeople), like it was made illegal to do so during the BLM protests.
Just like how the moment their videotape rental history was exposed, that was when privacy became an absolute must in the case of video rental services.
When supreme court justice kavanaugh was followed by protesters he had a hissy fit and said they couldnt do that. But it’s totally fine to spy on everyone with a phone and expose their medical data.
These hypocritical fuckheads deserve exactly what you are proposing and I’d fucking love to see it happen.
We could even say it’s to protect the children… make sure certain politicians who have expressed interest in legalizing child marriage aren’t left alone with any.
Get this in front of the Supreme Court ASAP!
…oh…
Time for faraday cage phone covers/bags to become popular in these states.
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.
This is correct. But if you don’t work in the field, it’s fine.
You don’t have to know how to bottle wine if you’re not a wine maker. You don’t need to know how to build a dam if you’re not an engineer. You don’t have to learn everything about the architecture of an OS if you’re a user and not a programmer. Let the kids use their devices without knowing obscure shit, just like people let us wear clothes without knowing how to sew. There are things we should all know how to do - changing a light bulb is cheaper if you don’t call an electrician every time it needs to be done. But there are things that are so opaque at first sight that they need to be performed by people with specialized knowledge. And it’s okay to not have that knowledge if you’re not in that field.
Yes, there are 1-2 generations where everyone was learning how computers work. But there were also quite a few generations where everyone was learning how agriculture and farming works - you know, to survive. And I’ll be damned if I wanna have my kids birth a cow or install Linux on their PC. Unless for some godforsaken reason they decide that’s their job.
You’re ignoring the point of why it’s useful and at this point, necessary, to have an above average understanding of technology to maintain any semblance of privacy in your life…you can do so much harm to yourself without ever knowing it just by having an Alexa or by having a Tesla.
At certain point it’s like what the fuck can we even do with things specifically like the tool this article is talking about but tech illiteracy isn’t excusable if this day and age anymore. The world demands a certain level of knowledge or you can and will be exploited.
I know this is the case today, but we are still in the early days of massive surveillance and everyone being globally interconnected. I have to trust legislation will follow to regulate this, just like any potentially dangerous invention is now regulated in most countries, from pharmaceuticals to firearms, to lead based paints, to news outlets.
The fact of the matter is, regular people cannot keep up with all inventions ever. It’s up to governments to protect their citizens from threats, and a failure to do so should be punished. If instead the government chooses to be that threat, the solution isn’t easy, but it is simple.
Mm idk, I think knowing how to use folders is pretty important. It helps people stay organized.
The article wasn’t talking about file systems like FAT32 or NTFS. It was talking about using directories, instead of “pulling files from a laundry basket” by using a search bar.
Ehhhh I’m not convinced that the method of dumping everything in a pile and using search is such a bad thing for average users. For admins on servers it’s absolutely critical to know what is in what directory, but for average users does it actually matter at all?
Honestly I’m bad enough about being consistent with my data organization I genuinely wonder if I should join them in just searching through the pile of documents rather than organizing in neat folders…
That explains why cars got so much worse once Boomers were no longer their primary market.
deleted by creator
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.
Edit to add- This is the way it should work. Instead the government really is just buying data they’d need a warrant for previously.
This is not an area of law I stay up to date on, but that did not used to be the case. Is that a rather new development?
Last I knew most courts were holding that since customers are sharing this information with third parties (sharing with their phone companies, Apple and Google, Facebook, etc.), giving everything away anyway, most individuals have waived any claim to an expectation of privacy. The right to privacy is founded upon reasonable expectations. I did hear about some pushback on that, more recently, but not from the Court of Appeals from DC, which has jurisdiction over appeals taken from federal agencies, prior to the Supreme Court. I’d be grateful to be shown otherwise. About time, if true.
Yeah I should have been more clear. That’s the way it should work. Instead the courts interpret the 4th amendment as narrowly as possible. Making it effectively non-existent in many cases.