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Mobile Phone Companies Appear To Be Selling Your Location To Almost Anyone (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: You may remember that last year, Verizon (which owns Oath, which owns TechCrunch) was punished by the FCC for injecting information into its subscribers' traffic that allowed them to be tracked without their consent. That practice appears to be alive and well despite being disallowed in a ruling last March: companies appear to be able to request your number, location, and other details from your mobile provider quite easily. The possibility was discovered by Philip Neustrom, co-founder of Shotwell Labs, who documented it in a blog post earlier this week. He found a pair of websites which, if visited from a mobile data connection, report back in no time with numerous details: full name, billing zip code, current location (as inferred from cell tower data), and more. (Others found the same thing with slightly different results depending on carrier, but the demo sites were taken down before I could try it myself.)
Time to open that Facebook account I guess - the war has been lost...
TFS talks about some information being made available to all bidders, but it doesn't NEARLY approach the information collected by FB. I am a FB user and I do have location services turned on. I see some creepy shit. It asked me about my trip to a place where I'd stopped in the parking lot on my way home from work. It offered a friend suggestion for a person I'd had no online interaction with, but sat down with that day at Starbucks for an hour. I can only imagine what they know about me that they're not sharing.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Or enjoy playing with them. Poison their data well. Create false information about yourself. Get creative and have exciting new hobbies. Have fun with it and explore the exiting world of being a product. Create a mail address for every possible occasion where you might need one and watch how it travels through the various places. Respond to their "quality assurance" test and enter as much false information as you can. Create 2, 3, 10 personas and let them gain a rich and interesting life. One of mine is for example a freeclimber and has shared many photos on instagram of his travels around the world. Google pix helps. Of course, photoshop it sufficiently to thwart algorithms trying to match it with the original. That's fairly easy and can be done by laymen by now. Create new and exciting landscapes in your back yard!
Not all is lost, and you can have a lot of fun duping corporations into trashing their data hive with your fakes. I don't know about you, but it sure entertains me to see corporations believe in the existence of a person that only exists in my head.
Maybe it's time to create a webpage dedicated to showing off how you could dupe data collectors into believing your forgeries.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Don't use Facebook... or any social networking site. If you're going to post on a site like Slashdot, consistently fake a few personal details and simply never share others.
Don't use GMail, Hotmail, or any other such system. (I run my own mail server, which is probably not reasonable for most people... but there's also probably a market out there for a small appliance with a domain registration + DNS package that gives you your mail server without too much user effort).
I have friends 'IRL', which is where they belong. If I only ever catch up with you by reading your Facebook page... we're not friends anymore anyway.
You're still going to leave a trail through your credit or debit card, plus whatever government database you're in that is shared in any way, but you can significantly limit the data gathered on you.
Unfortunately, that's less true every day. Every photo you're in is subject to facial recognition and even if it's not location tagged... location recognition probably isn't far behind (I don't like being photographed and every year I let my kids' school know they're not authorized to publish their names or pictures except in the hardcopy yearbooks). Every text post you're mentioned in can be used to build a shadow profile of you. Other people are giving up your personal information for you whether you want them to or not. And, of course... your phone company is pimping you out to data miners like you're a $2 alley-dwelling crack whore.
I got an ad on facebook for an anti snoring aid. I did not say anything about that on facebook, nor did I shop for anything like that. The only way it would know such things is that it monitors the microphone on the phone. The facebook "lite" app I installed a couple of months ago was promptly removed from my phone.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
It offered a friend suggestion for a person I'd had no online interaction with, but sat down with that day at Starbucks for an hour.
I bet that friend got home and looked you up on Facebook to see more about you, browse through your photos etc. And that if they look you up, then they get suggested to you as a friend.
Recognizing snoring seems like some perfect entry level tasking for phones and "assistants" There is quite a bit of valuable data to be gleaned from doing so.
Watch tv before you sleep? What channel? (Demographics info)
What time do you usually go down? (Scheduling/location)
Are there more than one of you? (Relationship status)
Breathing patterns and snoring (Health status)
Presence of animals (Pet info)
Each of these points is worth something to somebody, and that's just the top of the head stuff. It's also all pretty repetitive noises sampled every night, so simple for automated detection and such, so no real reason not to do something like this.
A few years from now, the shocking amount of data these things collect, correlate, corroborate, and index on everybody (not just the owner) is going to come out. It will barley even register on the outrage scale, there will be some congressional hearings, the big data merchants will answer some questions delivered in a stern voice, and nothing will change.
tl;dr=There's no money in NOT listening to you sleep.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.