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.

  • @[email protected]English
    13•8 hours ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      8•6 hours ago

      I don’t think this would be technically useful to prevent exploitation of location data. The handset always has to identify to a tower using the SIM card, which is going to identify the phone and its user. Your cellular service provider can still sell this information to data brokers.

      With that said, I would love the option to lie about my location to apps that have no business knowing it.

    • sunzu2
      4•8 hours ago

      Tower dats i guess is harder to get as it requires a warrant?

      • OptionalEnglish
        3•8 hours ago

        Unless you become a phone company or use a StingRay

        • @[email protected]English
          4•6 hours ago

          Or you just have some money to buy the data from a data broker that phone company sell your data to already.

        • sunzu2
          2•7 hours ago

          Well i meant why wouldn’t telco sell or provide it to the feds?

          • OptionalEnglish
            1•6 hours ago

            If they get a warrant, sure. Sell it I dunno. There’s more legal cases about cell tower data simply because it’s some form of technology courts have at least made an effort to understand at some point.

            • sunzu2
              3•6 hours ago

              Well we know telco sells your traffic data as ISP as “anonymized” i dont see how they are not doing this with tower data but i am not familair with case law on the issue.

              So maybe there is some legal bar to that…

              Amazing how warrant got turned into a joke in modern age tho all within last 30 years.