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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.)
We ARE the product, and short of bloody revolution there's SFA we can do about it. Time to open that Facebook account I guess - the war has been lost, so I may as well get as much value as I can out of our corporate overlords in return for them raping my privacy.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
You agreed to this in the ToS. This should not be a surprise to anyone. Turn the phone off when you do your nefarious deeds; or leave it someplace where you plan to have your alibi.
Slackers, there's money to be made!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Everything which is not forbidden is compulsory.
If a company isn't forbidden from selling it to make money they will find a way to do so.
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.
If the war is lost, why did they need to keep it secret??
Just buy up every celebrity location, politician, judge, tv presenter's data and do cross analysis on it.
Want to know who Hannity met just before he repeated that Russian "deep state" crap? Just pull his data, his families data and do co-location analysis to go see.
Want to know who Chairman Pai met just before he started on that attempt to kill Net Neutrality, well his location data will show where he was and who he met with, if it was a face to face meeting that is.
The only people stripped from that data are typically Verizon, ATnT CEO's. We learned they strip their own data from the NSA spy set, so it will be stripped from this one too.
You are carrying a location tracking device in your pocket. Don't be surprised.
So instead of "Follow the Money", the new investigator's dogma is "Follow the Phones". Nice.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
As I understand this, it could be easily thwarted by running a VPN. My wife runs vpn on her phone constantly. It is easy enough.
Oh, rest assured. With systems like that, they can make you an offer you can't refuse.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Does the phone come with its own cell phone towers?
That's it - you're on the list now; this will be on your Permanent Record
and it is firmly anchored to the wall. Next question?
"If you must carry a phone take the battery out and only insert it when you want to make a call".
Give me a break. It is 2017. If you are going to use your mobile phone like that, why carry one at all. And what is astonishing is someone posted this drivel on the Internet. If you are going to all this trouble, why are you using the Internet? The Internet is the biggest data collection machine of them all.
I miss a great deal from family members and old friends from school because I refuse to touch facebook. I've stuck with my decision, and certainly won't change it now, but say there is no cost is wrong.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
Like a good little corporate whore...
Location services has fuck all to do with what Verizon was doing.
You couldn’t opt out of it. Verizon was doing it in secret.
No you don't. No one uses Tor for day to day browsing. Baloney. And Tor is completely broken at this point anyway. The exit nodes are monitored.
Exactly. People are missing the entire point.
If Verizon and AT&T are pathologically customer-hostile, then it is time for the electorate to emasculate them.
Tor is obviously not enough. Fine them into oblivion, then sell their assets at auction.
Let's address the root of the issue: This is all 100% legal because the assclowns that most people vote for made it so. None of this should be legal. My ISP shouldn't be selling my info. My cell provider shouldn't be selling my info.
I don't respond to AC's.
And I'm getting sick of strangers calling me.
If a company has data about you, they are selling it to anyone willing to pay the fee.
There are exceptions, of course, but they are rare enough to safely ignore.
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. [examples...]
Reminds me of the "defamation service" suggested by some people in the '80s. Idea was to hire a servince to spread lots of scandalous, but clearly false if examined closely, rumor about you, in order to discredit any other rumors about you later.
Problem is, that puts too high a bar on the rumor-hearers. If they DON'T go on to the discrediting stage, you've just trashed your own rep for no gain - and lots of potential loss.
Scandalous rumor (especially if true, but false can do it, too) can take down even a rich and powerful figure VERY fast. See Harvey Weinstein for an example of fast, JonBenet Ramsey's parents for an example of false.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
From reading the blog post carefully, it looks like this is designed for credit card processing verification at the point of service. Allowing the gas station's credit card processor to verify you really are at the gas station your credit card is being used at. So in that use case, they would already have your location because they know where the POS terminal is located. This doesn't seem too concerning to me, but they should probably provide an opt-out.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
Some of us consider every month dumping wireless phones completely and going back to POTS and an answering machine, just to poke these bastard companies in the eye.
This is SO tiring. Everywhere there is someone looking for some way to sell us out for a quick buck. Here we go again, the carriers trying to get their pound of flesh and avoid being disintermediated by the Facebooks and Alphabets of the world.
Not really related, but last night I saw the 60 Minutes piece showing how Rep. Tom Marino, a Pennsylvania Republican, shepherded big-pharma-written legislation to prevent the DEA from prosecuting Fortune 500 companies which deliberately make opiates available for diversion to the black market, fueling the epidemic and their profits. All with congressional cover.
It's just nonstop. Seems like it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Is anybody still under the impression that Orwell's "Big Brother" can only be a government?
The rise of "Big Brother" is being missed because everybody's convinced it can only come from the Government... and not from friendly corporations, who only have our best interests at heart.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
getting by without a mobile phone is damn near impossible, especially in today's hyper-competitive job market.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That's a great idea. Let me get started:
I'm a 6'2'" wall of muscle with a string of romantic conquests, a PHD is Astrophysics and a collection of Star Wars action figures.
Ha! Only one of those things is true but good luck figuring out which with all your highfalutin statistics.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
After the eclipse while on vacation, I got spammed on my cell phone from a business I drove past. I wondered who outed me, guess it was my cell phone service.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
We need a comprehensive law that requires for each and every bit of information to be collected written consent. First violation is 5% of annual revenue, second offense is 20% of revenue, third is the end of the entire corporation with top level managers being personally liable for any damages. Harsh, but will fix this rampant abuse in no time.