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.

  • @GreenKnight23English
    15•1 month ago

    It drives me nuts how our economic system is making not having a cell phone increasingly difficult.

    that’s by design. why you do you think the US government allows corporate interests to take such a high position above American citizens? it’s not just only because of corruption, it’s because one hand washes the other.

    The smartphone is the most amazing futuristic device I dreamed about that has evolved into a distopian nightmare.

    like all technology, it can be used in ways that you cannot even imagine.

    instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.

    imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can’t even tell what’s real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.

    • SchadrachEnglish
      9•1 month ago

      instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.

      imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can’t even tell what’s real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.

      There’s an ad blocker that does exactly this. Called Ad Nauseam. Chrome blocked it from their store super fast, then blocked it from being installed in Chrome from 3rd party sites, then blocked known versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode. I used to run it set to a low percentage - if I “clicked” every ad they’d know to throw my data out, but if I click say 3% of them…

    • @PriorityMotifEnglish
      6•1 month ago

      Run a headless browser that does random searches at random times across different social media and search engines and have it click random ads.

      • @GlitterbombEnglish
        3•1 month ago

        This was part of the fictional operating system in the book Little Brother. I think it inspired similar features in a particular real life Linux build too

    • @[email protected]English
      3•1 month ago

      that’s by design.

      See also: automobiles. Automobiles and smartphones certainly have strong cases for how utilitarian they are. They are both genuinely very useful.

      But the expectation that everyone has one, along with them becoming practically a requirement for most people, has turned them into a dependency and a means of control. Some people can manage to forgo them, but you almost have to build your life around doing so.

    • @bamficEnglish
      1•1 month ago

      ML breaks this defense

      • @GreenKnight23English
        3•1 month ago

        does it though? if everyone is sharing their advertising data under the covers no amount of ML could correct it.

        think of it like a tor network for advertisement tracking.

        you’re going to Walmart, I’m going to Target. but according to our phones, I’m at Walmart and you’re at Target. now scale it up to thousands or even millions of users sharing their advertising trackers.