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Man Creates "Creepy" Stalking App
An anonymous reader writes "Creepy, a package described as a 'geolocation information aggregator,' is turning heads in privacy circles, but should people be worried? Yiannis Kakavas explains why he developed his scary stalking application. Creepy is a software package for Linux or Windows — with a Mac OS X port in the works — that aims to gather public information on a targeted individual via social networking services in order to pinpoint their location. It's remarkably efficient at its job, even in its current early form, and certainly lives up to its name when you see it in use for the first time."
Anyone instantly worried that installing this software in your own machine might also make any data on that machine available for stalking?
It somehow doesnt seem like a good idea to me to trust a programmer proficient at this kind of this without a very very thorough code review first
People, what a bunch of bastards
And you can even stalk people who don't use twitter etc.
So, the eula's take everything you post on these services (since you agreed to it), make apps to release the info (that you agreed to release) and this guy is a social phenomena for making a program to track what users freely gave up to join the sites in question?
And this is creepy?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
If you publish your whereabouts on public streams of social networks, it is publically available. Even the biggest idiot on the internet will grasp that. Has anyone ever thought about the fact that people who check in to a location on Foursquare, post pictures of themselves at that location on Flickr and mention that location on Twitter might actually want the world to know where they are?
so we now need an anti creepy to spot stalkers?
Oh wait, you need a Twitter/Flickr account and need to have given them data about yourself? I guess I'll have to spread some seeds for it and check back later. I'll get right on that...
2. Anonymous, Wikileaks and other activists
3. Firesheep, Creepy and other social media privacy exploits
4. Botnets and other advanced commercial malware
5. Stuxnet and other government actors
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In the 90's and early 00's it was the Frontier, where everyone gave everyone else a hand. Now, we need to start walking around with six shooters.
The amount of data breaches alone are frightening: http://www.privacyrights.org/data-breach#CP , http://www.databreaches.net/
I think Twitter blocked this app already, was working one minute and not the next.
I don't know that this really does much you can't do fairly easily already. So if you have someone's name and city, there is a good chance you can locate them. Why? All kinds of things in the public record you could look up. Own a house? Then there's a record of that publicly available. Phone numbers are normally listed (though with the increase in cell phones that is less common).
What it comes down to is that in a modern society, we are going back to how it was in older, smaller societies: You can have privacy, but you cannot have anonymity, at least not without a good deal of trouble and sacrifice.
So back in the day, with much smaller communities and so on you had an "everyone knows everyone" situation. Not literally, but people were known to a substantial part of the town. As such it was just not possible to be anonymous. Your comings and goings were noticed. Where you lived was known, that kind of thing. If you moved to a new place, again you've be noticed. Short of going and living a very solitary life, you couldn't be anonymous.
Now privacy you could have, easily. If you wanted a private conversation, just walk out in a field where nobody was within earshot. In your house you had almost complete certainty nobody could spy since there was no advanced technology. What you did you could keep private to a large degree. That you were around doing things you could not.
As things grew anonymity became more and more possible. You could just disappear in a large city, go about your business but be unknown and invisible to most everyone.
Well, that is changing back again. Technology is making it such that anonymity is going away. It is just very difficult to make yourself unknowable. Privacy is certainly possible, and the Supreme Court has ruled it is a right and thus the government is required to respect it. However anonymity is pretty hard.
So that an app can find where you live fairly easily isn't surprising at all to me. There's just a lot of public documents on you, and the Internet makes it easy to search them. The information you choose to provide on social network sites makes it even easier.
It is just kinda something we have to accept, unless we want to radically alter how society works.
Also we need to understand that anonymity and privacy are not the same thing. Too many people conflate the two. They think a right to privacy means the right to be totally unknown. Not the case. It means the right to have the specifics of your life secret, not that you are living your life a secret.
What you do in your house is your private business. That you are in your house it not private. You neighbours can watch you come home and leave, and know when you are there. That is 100% legal and ethical. You will not be anonymous. However they can't go and spy on you and see what you are doing. You can still be private.
A link to the actual site for the program: http://ilektrojohn.github.com/creepy/. Also, this program has copyright notices for 2010. So... (Though admittedly the article is dated 30 March 2011.)
Anyway, yeah, the program is written in Python it seems. And it doesn't even run for me.
Possibly because some dependencies aren't in the Ubuntu 9.10 universe. Bleh.
Anyway, I just wanted to say one other thing. I ain't worried, 'cause I don't use Social Networks! Hah! You crazy stalking types are going to have to try harder to find out about me than that. (Please help, I have no friends.)
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Dammit blocked?
I saw this as a good opportunity to audit myself. There shouldn't be anything out there that i know of.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
I'm not worried, because anyone that stalks me is bound to find out that I'm creepier than they are.
I can confirm this.
This App's rubbish. I put in Uncle Osama and the places it came up with are nowhere near where he is.
Why are people saying this is a privacy issue? It's not. It uses publicly available information that the person freely posts online for the general public to read. Its like saying articles posted in the New York Times is private information of the authors who write for it. This program dosen't even do anything cool like make HTTP requests from state / city govermently run publicly available data.
There are all ready existing applications out there that have all the features this software has and much much more.
TruePunk | Games
Such apps will create the necessary awareness of the dangers of putting too much info online. It'll put a stop to the stupid attitude of "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".
It's no longer just the government that's looking into your affairs. It's also the neighbor, your aunt in Australia and your colleagues. And with these kinds of apps they can suddenly dig up a lot more dirt. Dirt which was available all along.
We're punishing the tool maker for its misuse again? Someone should warn Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
cree.py has been out for some time now.
This guy got it all wrong. He didn't make a creepy geolocation aggregator; he made an "advanced geolocation forensics tool for use in the intelligence community". Had he labeled it properly and been more greedy, he could be laughing all the way to the bank! He definitely could have taken a page out of the Hoglund/Barr book here.
How is it stalking when the alleged "stalked" are intentionally publishing their location data?
People who constantly "check in" and publish their exact GPS coordinates online 100 times a day have no right to bitch about people following them around online.
Would it really be that hard for flickr etc. to strip out the metadata from the uploaded photos, then allowing the users to opt-in if they want to leave the data in place? There could even be an "advanced" setting to allow users to pick and choose (date OK, camera OK, location NO). (They may already have this, didn't check.)
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLPZmPaHme0
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... which would be a great way to hint to an evil master server that all of your disparate web identities you just checked up on are in fact the same person ;)
.evom ton seod gis eht
Privacy situations are in the running for the defining issue of this upcoming decade. Call the previous few years a "warmup" phase.
Apps like this go for the "wait, what?" factor. Say you're my "friend" on Facebook, and you post your address, maybe in a "News from Oak St Dayton Ohio" kind of a feed, etc.
So then someone goes a little over the top and just cruises up on a Saturday with Lasagna and starts setting lunch on your table. Cue shocked outrage. "But you're my friend, and you don't care about me knowing where you are right? And I wanted to meet you for months!"
Put another way, we're getting a weird convergence of TurboSharing vs Terrorist Hysteria, and so far the two are keeping their oil-water boundaries, but the tipping factor is our steady craving for excitement in "reality entertainment" which includes Leak Fever, and then we'll get the perfect storm.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Obviously he's putting this together so he can make AI clones of people.
We're punishing the tool maker for its misuse again? Someone should warn Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.
I can own a gun to defend myself. I might never need to use it.
It wouldn't be hard to convince a jury that the only reason to own stalking software was to stalk someone.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Given the way a lot of Facebook users post anything and everything about themselves, it is not necessary to install this software to digitally stalk someone.
No Natalya, now ve Spike dem. Better luck next time, slugheads!
I AM INVINCIBLE!
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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What the FBI/CIA/NSA have that does the same thing?
Why Goldman Sachs thinks Facebook is worth 50 billion?
Why people join and participate in Facebook willing giving up their info for others to profit by?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
If he (or someone else) went one more step and had live feeds of politicians' locations, boom: Terrorist.
Though I think such feeds for the top 50 wealthiest CEOs would be more interesting and satisfying.
no link immediately and easily visible to the software itself or the site. Veeery good journalism....
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
electro (as in "electronical") -> ilektro
Yiannis (the programmer's greek name) -> john
I'd take a wild guess he's studied Electrical Engineering.
electro (as in "electronic") -> ilektro
Yiannis (the programmer's greek name) -> john
I'd take a wild guess he's studied Electrical Engineering.
FTFM.
A weapon is just as responsible as the person using it -- its sole purpose is to harm, and that is all it does. If you want to defend yourself, learn to run fast or something.
Run fast? Brilliant! Do you have a newsletter, your solutions are fantastic! I can't help but think they can be applied to a broader spectrum of worldwide issues. Just think of where the late Libyan protesters might be had your insight been available to them.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
The tweet is coming from inside the house! Get out of there!
At a guess, the Windows one was created with py2exe or something similar and includes the Python interpreter and libraries. The Ubuntu one is probably just some compiled python code.
No worries here... I'm pretty sure I'm already on a few watch lists because I've emailed the words "bomb", "obama", "durka durka", and "mohammed jihad" The way I see it, I'm glad to let people know where I am in case I'm ever drunk and don't know where I am.
He's right in one way: Wanting a gun for "defense" is quite a lot of bull. I haven't seen a single person hitting a bullet aimed for him in my lifetime. That would be using it for "defense". Shooting someone in "defense" isn't defending. It's preempting a possible attack.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd use it to find out what someone could find out about me.
Another question, what's your stance towards nmap? It wouldn't be hard to convince a jury that the only reason to own a network sniffing software is to sniff someone else's network.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mods, I apologize for continuing this OT discussion but....
Any reasonable definition of self defense (legal or otherwise) means exactly what you are saying it does not. Even if your definition of defense were correct, guns in general (which was the original statement) are not the act of shooting people , much the same way as a bodyguard is not the same as having people beaten. The utility of guns and bodyguards come more from their threat of reprisal than the actual usage of them.
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz
I'd use it to find out what someone could find out about me.
Another question, what's your stance towards nmap? It wouldn't be hard to convince a jury that the only reason to own a network sniffing software is to sniff someone else's network.
I think a competent lawyer could convince a jury that sniffing your own network is a believable use of nmap but stalking yourself is not a believable use of a stalking app.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
So trying to find out whether my network is secure is "plausible" but trying to find out whether too much information about me is floating around the internet and that I want to prepare for the fallout is not?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So trying to find out whether my network is secure is "plausible" but trying to find out whether too much information about me is floating around the internet and that I want to prepare for the fallout is not?
Yes. A jury could be led to conclude that the first is much more plausible than the second.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine