Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the world. Abortion clinics, places of worship, and individual people can all be monitored without a warrant.

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.

      • @saltescEnglish
        16•29 days ago

        I’d be surprised if it lasted longer than any other socially progressive trend. A few weeks, tops, with largest proportions falling off in the first week.

        This is the reality of social momentum these days. Resistance is no threat because it has extremely brief lifespan before moving onto the next thing to be a part of.

        • @YarHarSuperstarEnglish
          10•29 days ago

          I agree but not because it’s “trends” but because this system forces us to have short attention spans by presenting us with a massive deluge of information about horrible things happening everywhere (many of which are caused either directly or indirectly by that very system) so we have basically no choice but to keep shifting our focus and updating our threat assessments or risk becoming totally overwhelmed and falling behind or burning out.

          • @SzylerEnglish
            3•28 days ago

            I instinctively closed your comment after reading “short attention span” because I knew what you were going to say. Had to go back to comment because I realise the irony.

      • @[email protected]English
        6•29 days ago

        It also won’t work since the service has enough precision to know whether you go in, and for how long. The real issue is that mobile phones are continuously broadcasting their location to any device that wants to listen, even if you turn wifi and bluetooth off.

    • OptionalEnglish
      2•29 days ago

      Or - OR, right, everyone can turn off location and WiFi on their phones.

      It’s true the cell ping is always going, but that’s a different thing and definitely not what this tool is using to track people. Odds are good it’s using facebook or some other cancer to perform this evil.

      • @[email protected]English
        18•29 days ago

        I don’t think cellular location would be excluded from such tracking tbh. I would rather not take my phone with me at all when visiting such a potentially sensitive place, or at the very least use a Faraday cage.

        • OptionalEnglish
          2•29 days ago

          That would be a better approach, of course.

      • BuelldozerEnglish
        6•29 days ago

        Odds are good it’s using facebook or some other cancer to perform this evil.

        You really need to read the entire article. Turning off your WiFi and deleting Facebook isn’t going to fix this.

        • OptionalEnglish
          6•29 days ago

          It’s a good start tho

          This sort of surveillance is only possible because of the mobile advertising ecosystem. Location data is sometimes used to build profiles on device users and better target advertisements to them. Much of that advertising relies on a MAID, the unique advertising ID, on a phone. The MAID acts as the digital glue between a device and its associated data.

          But that same underlying system, of Google and Apple linking a unique identifier on the phone to a user’s activity, allows Babel Street and others to build their mass monitoring products. In many cases, a device’s MAID is also displayed inside Babel Street.

          So periodically refresh / replace your ad id as well.

      • @[email protected]English
        5•29 days ago

        The problem is turning off wifi doesn’t actually turn off the wifi, it just stops a subset of packets being broadcast and won’t trasmit any data you want it to send. Among other things this is how ‘find my device’ works with the wifi and bluetooth “off”. They’re actually on.

        • @wreckedcarzzEnglish
          2•29 days ago

          You can turn this wifi and bt scanning/‘location accuracy improvements’ off though, at least on android. It’s tucked away in the settings but once it’s done, it’s done.

      • the post of tom joadEnglish
        3•29 days ago

        Or - OR, right, everyone can turn off location and WiFi on their phones.

        Right now. But maybe not forever and so regulation to make sure that we canor even better, regs against this tracking. Because it shouldn’t be necessary.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•29 days ago

        That won’t work. But if you install the ROM without gapps or closed source software, you don’t have to worry about these issues.

        • OptionalEnglish
          4•29 days ago

          Having just done that for the first time I feel confident in saying anyone who’s still using facebook or Xitter or tiktok or whatever - is not going to do that. I wish they would but that’s an order of magnitude more technical than where they are.

          • @[email protected]English
            2•29 days ago

            Counterpoint - the only reason I didn’t degoogle earlier was because my phone simply didn’t support Lineage or Divest. Chances are that whatever budget Chinaphone you have would be in the same situation. Now I bought a Pixel specifically with the intent of installing a privacy-preserving OS, but for a while most I could do was ADB-disabling Google services.

            Unlike installing Linux, chances are high that a degoogled OS wouldn’t work on the hardware you already have.

            • OptionalEnglish
              0•29 days ago

              Oh it took me a solid month of trial and error, scrolling through xda and other forums reading every how-to and watching plenty of vids and I finally got it to work. But it was not even fun. Yes starting with a Pixel is better, but f* teh googlez.