[HN Gopher] The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your ...
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The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and
search history
Author : DamnInteresting
Score : 353 points
Date : 2021-09-16 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| uhtred wrote:
| Just don't use Google?! Seriously, it's not that hard to remove
| google from your personal life. If your job makes you use google,
| just view your email using the web app or use an email client on
| phone.
| Clubber wrote:
| Sure, but Google is just one way to collect that data. You'd
| have to get rid of your cell phone, or at least not carry it
| around. Better make sure your car doesn't have OnStar or any
| other similar tracking device built in too. Once facial
| recognition goes mainstream, you're pretty hosed regardless of
| what you do.
| uhtred wrote:
| If the guy in this story had a google free phone he
| presumably wouldn't have been caught in the net. I don't
| think cell tower location tracking is accurate enough that
| the cops would have used it in this case. For privacy, don't
| use google (or apple). For anonymity, leave your phone at
| home.
| tu7001 wrote:
| I think crimination of nearly all abortion is a good thing, cause
| an abortion is a murder.
| gootler wrote:
| Good! We need more of this. So tired of the crooks getting away
| with it. All the BLM assholes who got free shit last year should
| be in jail. They stole and made inflation go way up. Somebody's
| gotta pay, and it's the honest people.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Someone (Eric Schmidt? not sure) once said, "If you really want
| something to be private, don't put it on a computer."
|
| Still the best advice. Rather than storing it and then worrying
| about where it goes, just don't store it.
| hwers wrote:
| This really handicaps your ability to use it as the powerful
| tool that it is though. I wish this was a real option.
| midnightGhost wrote:
| Eric Schmidt also said in a interview back when Google was
| starting up that they wanted to get Google right up to the
| "creepy line" but not cross it. This interview was also put in
| a documentary called "The Creepy Line." I'll see if I can find
| the interview though and link it to this comment.
|
| Edit: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=mpmOL-MT5lQ
| rastafang wrote:
| Nice, yt-dlp is able to download that video.
| foxfluff wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/YSjsxB2.png
| [deleted]
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a
| computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera:
| getting pretty impossible to follow this advice.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| How do I turn off my existence?
| [deleted]
| genewitch wrote:
| Psychedelics?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I'm not minimizing the dangers of someone _else_ recording
| you. I don 't think Schmidt was even thinking about that,
| probably because smartphones weren't so ubiquitous then.
|
| However, you CAN control what you do yourself. Your to-do
| list can quite easily be on a paper notebook, as can your
| journal. Another thread here talks about self-hosting your
| location history -- why TF would you even want that? You can
| leave your phone at home when you go places where you don't
| need it. You can talk to people instead of texting them. All
| these things might be inconvenient, and amusing for some of
| your friends. But you'll survive it.
|
| Maybe you can't shut off the flow of data about you, but you
| can at least refrain from adding to it.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > All these things might be inconvenient, and amusing for
| some of your friends. But you'll survive it.
|
| The entire point of such self-hosting is to achieve a
| similar level of convenience provided by the megacorps'
| products without them being able to profit off of your
| usage of them. People who will consider 'not tracking
| location' and 'only talking to people face to face' aren't
| the ones considering self-hosting their location data
| (unless their only reason for doing so was the megacorps'
| profit model).
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I'm more talking about your own devices recording and
| spying on you, without your consent.
| asquabventured wrote:
| > Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of
| a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's
| camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice.
|
| I predict an increase in the number of golfers and boat
| enthusiasts in my lifetime.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Boats are increasingly tracked by satellites.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| >boat enthusiasts
|
| Boat enthusiast here, I'm afraid even that'll be a
| struggle! I'm planning to move onto a sailing yacht fairly
| soon and carry on my job as a backend web developer, mobile
| internet is good enough to make this viable and things like
| Starlink will make it even easier in the coming years.
|
| I suppose you can still turn off the telescreen if you want
| to though, if you sail out of range of mobile towers and
| turn everything off you can hide from the world pretty
| effectively.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I hate to break it to you all, but there are computers in
| the sky now, too.
| asquabventured wrote:
| Yeah sure, that was some great intel from computers in
| the sky during our last drone strike in Kabul that killed
| a humanitarian NGO and his family. [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/us/politics/pentagon-
| dron...
| asquabventured wrote:
| Cheers! And when you come to port for a round of 18 it's
| perfectly normal to just leave your phone in the car or
| on the cart. Easy to have a great one on one conversation
| away from everything while standing around on the putting
| green.
|
| Makes sense why so many business and political deals are
| made on the golf course when you start thinking about the
| meta aspects of having no paper trail or being vulnerable
| to eavesdropping secretarial eyes & ears or some all-
| listening tech-panoptican.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I predict an increase in the number of golfers_
|
| You mean people who think they're safe because they don't
| realize they're in the earshot of another player's/random
| jogger's smartphone?
|
| (I'm totally thinking of a scene from _Person of Interest_
| , 4x12, when a character hides in a park and makes a call
| over satellite phone, to talk out of earshot of a malicious
| AI surveilling everyone, only to be spotted by it through a
| smartphone of a passing cyclist. Can't find any video clip
| of to link here, though.)
| jl6 wrote:
| Where's a startup selling Kaczynski shacks when you need one?
| ganglari wrote:
| So there's a record of everyone they sell a shack to? Come
| on. You gotta build your own Kaczynski shack. Amateur hour
| over here.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| Your non-proffesional bulk purchases of wood and/or logging
| equipment, as well as subsequent reduction of general
| consumer goods consumption has registered you as a
| 'potential kaczynski shack owner'.
| genewitch wrote:
| If you pay cash and get it from out of town I don't see
| how they'd track you, unless the lumber store is doing
| facial recognition and uploading that data somewhere.
|
| Maybe we need straw buyers for lumber?
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| You think LEO only asks Google for location data, and
| not, for example, On-Star or auto OEMs?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Serious question: are there links about the data your car
| keeps on you (if any)? I'm not talking about if you use
| Google or other web location services.
|
| I've done some cursory asking around and found nothing. I
| would think the real problem is that every car
| manufacturer and every model year is different.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Is there a self hosted app to track your location? I use Google
| maps to keep granular history so I can use it later for whatever.
| But if I could self host that'd be better.
| kawsper wrote:
| I use OwnTracks, it's opensource and available for both iOS and
| Android.
|
| You can configure a custom https endpoint and then your devices
| will ping the endpoint when there's significant movement.
| kelnos wrote:
| I've been using OwnTracks (plus ot-recorder) for a few years
| now, in parallel with Google's location tracking/timeline,
| and I find that OwnTracks tends not to update all that well
| or frequently.
|
| If I switch OwnTracks to "move mode", it's great, but then it
| drains battery like crazy. "Significant changes mode" doesn't
| really cut it to map out my track as I move around during the
| day. And it's especially annoying because I do have it set up
| to trigger some lights to turn on in my house when I get
| within 500 feet of home. Sometimes it'll finally trigger an
| hour or two after I get home, which isn't particularly
| useful. I've exempted the app from Android's "battery
| optimization" thing, and I'm using a Pixel 4, which shouldn't
| have any shenanigans like killing background apps frequently
| like some other manufacturers do.
| fencepost wrote:
| There have been a variety of such apps, going at least as far
| back as "Backitude" (now gone) on Android that could log to a
| local KML file that could then be uploaded to storage of your
| choice on a schedule.
|
| It could also connect to a URL of your specification to upload
| real-time updates.
|
| Keep in mind that if you're not concerned about immediate
| tracking you can log locally then use any of many options (e.g.
| FolderSync) to do scheduled uploads of a log file.
| shivam543 wrote:
| You can self-host nextcloud and try phonetrack app.
| https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/phonetrack
| polote wrote:
| https://gpslogger.app/ open source has plenty of settings can
| make a GET call every x minutes to url of your choice, you can
| either collect data by logging GET calls on your nginx or build
| an API for that specifically.
|
| Or you save to Gpx files and see history with any Gpx File
| Viewer
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| There's Trackbook for Android. It records locally to a GPX file
| and also has the option to use GPS only.
|
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.y20k.trackbook/
|
| https://github.com/y20k/trackbook
| imglorp wrote:
| Anything on Android is totally moot. You can "turn off
| locations" but you don't know if it has. It also has a dozen
| other ways to track you when correlated with others, such as
| inertial, wifi, cell cgi, audio, magnetic, bluetooth,
| optical, pressure, etc; some of which are in the baseband and
| inaccessible to the OS. You can keep it in a faraday bag but
| it can still record and upload later.
|
| Same thing could be said about IOS with the additional
| constraint that the vendor can do whatever it wants and we
| don't know what it's actually doing.
|
| If you care about privacy just don't carry a phone.
| Forbo wrote:
| > If you care about privacy just don't carry a phone.
|
| I feel like this position is unrealistic. Privacy is
| possible with a modern smartphone. Using an alternative OS
| on Android devices can help facilitate this. I've been
| using GrapheneOS as a daily driver for nearly six months
| now. Any issues I've run into have largely been due to my
| own configuration of the device.
|
| You can also get a lot of useful information from Michael
| Bazzell's books or podcasts. It may involve jumping through
| hoops but it is possible to go "off grid" in many regards.
|
| If your threat model includes your cell provider, then yes,
| a faraday bag may be worth looking into. There are also
| open alternatives like the Librem 5 or PinePhone that offer
| hardware kill switches. These types of cases are rare, but
| one doesn't need to become a complete technophobe.
|
| As it stands, _true_ privacy is relegated to the
| technologically elite, the truly paranoid, or those that
| can pay to play. I would love for that to change, but
| unfortunately that 's the current state of affairs.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _As it stands, true privacy is relegated to the
| technologically elite, the truly paranoid, or those that
| can pay to play. I would love for that to change, but
| unfortunately that 's the current state of affairs._
|
| Or the broke who can't afford the devices now more and
| more used against us.
|
| Or those who are willing to forgo the conveniences of
| such devices in exchange for privacy. Or, simply for the
| sanity of not having to deal with them.
|
| I'm firmly in the boat of "Could do any or all of those
| things" - I considered a PinePhone, have a PineBook Pro,
| could easily do GrapheneOS, and... I'm currently using
| none of them. I'm using an AT&T Flip IV that I leave at
| home regularly. If I have some fancy requirement, I can
| tether a laptop to it.
|
| You start from the assumption that a smartphone of some
| variety or another is a requirement - and I'll counter
| that, while it's certainly the _default_ option of modern
| life, the smartphone is really only a decade old, and
| there are ways of doing things without it we can go back
| to - and those things do generally still work.
|
| I'm at a point in my life where both I can be a bit
| annoying about things like reachability, and,
| interestingly, I'm hostile enough to tech that people
| _expect_ me to be a bit weird about things. Nobody was
| surprised when I showed up with a flip phone - but they
| _were_ surprised that I still had things like email and
| Google Maps capability on it (KaiOS). At which point, the
| gears started turning.
|
| Trying to find a way to de-evil what is looking more and
| more like a corrupted, user-hostile system through and
| through doesn't seem worth the time, when one can work
| towards not requiring people to be in that system in the
| first place.
| ghaff wrote:
| I know someone from school who is a fairly senior manager
| at one of the FAANGs. He only got a cell phone in the
| first place because he and his wife adopted and the nanny
| insisted. I know he has a company-issued smartphone now.
| Don't know if his personal phone is a smartphone by now
| or if he's still using a flip phone of some sort.
| Syonyk wrote:
| This is another thing rarely talked about that's quite
| common - people really high up in the tech companies _don
| 't use the stuff._
|
| Remember, when Steve Jobs' biographer asked him what his
| kids thought about the iPad, his response was, "They
| haven't used it." You're _more_ likely to find the
| "cellphone free" group among high level tech execs and
| such.
|
| Why is that? It's worth pondering.
|
| I know more and more people, deeply in tech
| professionally, who are opting out of it in their
| personal life, across the board. They know what it can
| do, they've seen it, may have worked on older versions of
| it, and simply want no part of it anymore.
| ghaff wrote:
| The main answer is probably that they don't need to. They
| have personal assistants and admins who deal with their
| appointments, their email, etc. And, believe it or not,
| some of them really do unplug when they go on vacation.
|
| In a former life when internal company email was becoming
| a thing, there were execs at my computer company that
| made one of these minicomputer-based office productivity
| systems who had their admins print out their email,
| they'd write responses by hand, and have the admin send
| the response.
| tharne wrote:
| > This is another thing rarely talked about that's quite
| common - people really high up in the tech companies
| don't use the stuff.
|
| This is true, kind of like how most drug dealers don't do
| drugs themselves.
| ghaff wrote:
| >I feel like this position is unrealistic.
|
| I'm not sure it's unrealistic but the tradeoffs for
| ditching a phone entirely day-in day-out wouldn't work
| for most people.
|
| As you say there are alternatives for smartphones and one
| could presumably alternatively carry a feature phone that
| can't be easily tied to their identity. (Although there's
| an increasing assumption that you have a smartphone to
| accomplish various tasks.)
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _Although there 's an increasing assumption that you
| have a smartphone to accomplish various tasks_
|
| Indeed, because... basically everyone carries one.
|
| So, in order to counter that, more people need to _not
| carry one._ Not just object to using smartphones, but,
| "Look, I literally don't own one, I know you want me to
| install thus and such app to complete some survey before
| entering the building, but I can't. What's the
| alternative?"
| tharne wrote:
| It's not unrealistic to not carry a phone everywhere. Do
| you really need to be reachable while you're at the
| grocery store? Unless you're on call or a firefighter,
| there are very few cases where you must be reachable
| 24/7. Try it sometime, you'd be surprised.
|
| Carrying a phone at all times is more a matter of social
| pressure than anything else. If you get into a real
| emergency situation, you can just ask someone if you can
| make a call from their phone -- after all, the world is
| full of people walking around with phones in their
| pocket.
|
| Leaving your phone at home most of the time is a little
| inconvenient, but it's certainly not unrealistic. It's
| just that most of people are happy to trade privacy for
| convenience.
| cheese_van wrote:
| I don't carry a phone. Partly for security, and partly
| because for 26 years (fed) I was required to carry one. Of
| course early in my career I had a pager. Every fucking day
| for 26 years.
|
| The phone I do use I bricked for all activity save voice
| and text: it sits on my kitchen table and there it stays.
| The upshot is that my phones are inexpensive, <$100. In
| fact, I just purchased a new one and am pleasantly
| surprised at the voice quality of 4G LTE.
|
| Certainly most people with jobs cannot afford to be out of
| touch and I understand it is a luxury to be un-tethered.
| However, my position in fed security and CI drove home the
| point: If you are connected with a cell phone, you're going
| to get pwned. The level of pwnage is directly proportional
| to your status and employer.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I use a trained neural network I keep between my ears...
|
| Recall is sometimes fuzzy with age, but it works well enough,
| and I don't have to worry about external queries violating my
| various rights nearly as much as with tech companies.
|
| At this point, I think every piece of modern consumer
| electronics ought to be considered hostile until proven benign.
| I've worked with enough of them over the years, on different
| ends, to no longer trust any of them.
|
| I'm also old enough to remember the before-times - when there
| wasn't the technology to track us everywhere, or, when we did
| have something breadcrumbing, it wasn't being automatically
| uploaded to whoever, wherever, etc.
|
| My first question, though, would be "Why?" What value do you
| get out of tracking your location with any great detail that
| self hosting it would be of much value? However, various cheap
| GPS loggers and Google Earth import probably would do a lot of
| what you're looking for.
| chrononaut wrote:
| > I use a trained neural network I keep between my ears...
| Recall is sometimes fuzzy with age, but it works well enough,
| and I don't have to worry about external queries violating my
| various rights nearly as much as with tech companies.
|
| I don't understand the point you're making (unless you're
| being snarky.) You recognize that most other users of Google
| Location History can do the same?
|
| > My first question, though, would be "Why?" What value do
| you get out of tracking your location with any great detail
| that self hosting it would be of much value?
|
| Another way of framing is what utility Location History can
| provide to users. Some use cases are casual ("Where did I go
| exactly on this trip two years ago?", "Where did I eat when I
| was in X city 9 months ago?", etc) while other people have
| personal uses for it:
| https://towardsdatascience.com/analyzing-my-google-
| location-...
|
| > However, various cheap GPS loggers and Google Earth import
| probably would do a lot of what you're looking for.
|
| That would probably work, as well perhaps another OSM-based
| mapping application. I don't know the value of all that extra
| metadata which is computed though (as highlighted in the
| above article).
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _I don 't understand the point you're making (unless
| you're being snarky.)_
|
| I am. I'm referring to my brain in a "tech industry
| buzzword" way. It is, technically speaking, a trained
| neural network. Just a biological one, not a silicon/code
| based one. I happen to like it, and it can also do things
| like tell the difference between a low moon in the sky
| through a smoke haze and a traffic light.
|
| > _Another way of framing is what utility Location History
| can provide to users._
|
| "If there are any positives, then the technology is worth
| using!" style thinking misses, entirely, the concept of
| opportunity cost, and the various downsides.
|
| I won't argue that it's not pretty cool to see everywhere
| you've been - but it's also an _exceedingly_ detailed
| record of who you are, and anyone who claims it can be
| suitably anonymized is full of crap (see the Grindr Bishop
| for a solid case study here).
|
| Where I really start to get upset, though, is that there's
| no opt-in for this, other than some vague, generic, "nobody
| reads this and it doesn't say anything anyone would
| understand anyway" clickthroughs.
|
| Android doesn't have a, "Would you like us to keep a record
| of your location and everywhere you've been? You can review
| it later and see what cool places you've been!" sort of
| opt-in. It _just does it._
|
| Google clearly is getting some value from that data, and
| it's not at all clear what it is.
| chrononaut wrote:
| Right, and I think OP (or at least myself) agrees with
| the points you've made, which is why they seem to be
| trying strike a balance between gaining the advantages of
| Location History, but keeping that data to themselves and
| outside the Google umbrella, and thus want to understand
| how to do it.
|
| I view it similarly as others looking at methods to self-
| host their photo backup with timeline indexing and
| searching, etc.
| nbzso wrote:
| But, but this is the only way to deliver consumer products.
| This is profitable for corporations and shareholders and
| users have "nothing to hide" and love it.
|
| Did you realize that the world is a step away from total
| Panopticon (https://shorturl.at/mCJK2).
|
| The "digital natives" don't care at all. The "millenials" are
| just ignorant. The "X-ers" are fighting to stay relevant and
| "young". The "boomers" are screaming from the trenches, but
| the echo is responding with the usual "OK. Boomer".
|
| It is over. This is the Great Reset, created by Davos Elites
| and embraced by Corporations, Governments and "modern" people
| of the world.
|
| This is the direct result of corrupted societies which
| abandoned classical education and liberal arts long time ago.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| I recently set my google location history to auto-delete. At
| first I wanted to keep it recording my location history
| forever because "just in case" I needed to know where I was
| for something that was extremely unimportant. Overall, I've
| looked at it only handful of times over the many years it has
| been running so in the end it really helps Google more than
| it helps me. I might even just turn it off completely. I'm
| slowly shirking this data-hoarding, "I might need it one
| day", mentality.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Do we have reason to believe that auto-delete means
| anything other than "hide it from me, please?"
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| I believe according to their privacy policy and from past
| press statements deleting the data does trigger a real
| wipe of the data but I think there is a up to 30 day
| delay (not sure exactly) (wiping data from thousands of
| servers is actually kind of difficult).
|
| If your threat level is NSA/nation state then this isn't
| good enough since they probably could get a copy before
| Google deletes it but it is probably enough to be useless
| for low level LE.
| Y_Y wrote:
| At least in the EU, they run the (qualified) risk of a
| collosal statutory fine. It wouldn't be easy to get them
| audited (particularly in Ireland where the Data
| Protection Commission favours discretion over valour),
| and they'd have to actually get caught. Assuming that
| they didn't hide the evidence, and the auditors found it,
| and the necessary hoops were jumped, it could be
| financially and reputationally painful, even for big G.
| endless1234 wrote:
| If so, why believe "don't save location history" would
| mean anything either?
| sodality2 wrote:
| Difference being "don't save" would mean not being
| ingested at all; if it is sent to google, a stink could
| be made (perhaps by sniffing netreqs, looking at GPS
| requests, etc). Once it's in Google, us peons would have
| no way to verify _any claim_.
| goodpoint wrote:
| No. "don't save" does not mean "don't send to google".
|
| All geolocation based on GSM cells and wifi sends your
| location continuously.
| [deleted]
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| At the risk of sounding paranoid but how do we know if they
| actually pause/delete it?
| Syonyk wrote:
| I love Google Location History.
|
| If you're trying to make a point to someone about how much
| of a problem data collection, use, abuse, etc, is - link
| them to the place they can view their own history. It's
| even more fun if you're with them and can watch the
| expression of utter horror form as they realize just what,
| exactly, _literally everywhere they 've been_ can tell
| someone else about them. "Hey, isn't that the kink club out
| there?"
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Would they be horrified of going to a kink club? I feel
| like the type of person that would go to one, especially
| these days, would not care.
| genewitch wrote:
| I check this from time to time and mine has always been
| completely blank.
|
| Even on my phone when I search for "tires in <city>" it
| assumes I mean a city in the east coast of the US.
| Maps/Waze are only marginally better, showing me results
| 170+ miles from my current location, generally.
|
| I use trackmenot and ad nauseam plugins on my main
| computer, so my ads are always 100% irrelevant - if I see
| them at all. Ad nauseam clicks every ad it sees, and
| stores the banner. It tries to track how many dollars of
| ad spend its wasted on your behalf, too. I'm somewhere
| north of $17k at this point lifetime clicks.
|
| I know I'm not winning this fight but I can make it more
| hilarious for me in the meantime.
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| That $17k would've either been rejected as ad fraud in
| the best case, and just ended up funding the companies
| you hate at worst.
| Kiro wrote:
| I've not seen that reaction at all. Everyone gets really
| excited when I show them.
| Forbo wrote:
| OsmAnd allows you to record your movement and leverages
| OpenStreetMap.
| dudus wrote:
| I just had to provide records of my past travel history for
| immigration purposes and I couldn't find any of my i-94
| records. I could sort through emails to find past flight
| tickets but the data from my Google location tracking history
| proved to be much more reliable and easy to parse. I was able
| to get all my flight dates from past 5 years easily with it.
|
| I also like to look for places I've been in the past and Google
| maps can tell me the dates I've been to a specific place in the
| past.
|
| So it does provide quite a lot of value at least for me. I
| completely understand the sentiment that seems to be a majority
| on hacker news how that's quite a bad idea, how I'm giving away
| my privacy for convenience and yada yada. But I made the
| personal decision that Yes it's worth exposing this data to
| Google and possibly law enforcement that require Google to
| disclose this information for the convenience I get in return.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| You couldn't use CBP's travel history page?
|
| https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/I94/#/history-search
| dudus wrote:
| I've used this in the past but currently it's showing no
| records for all my 3 passports.
| privong wrote:
| There are standalone GPS loggers that lack transmitters and log
| location to SD cards in CSV / GPX formats (e.g., [0]). It's one
| more thing to carry, but it's small and you can be reasonably
| confident that it won't transmit your location to anyone. But
| the particular one I've posted doesn't have the ability to
| encrypt the data as its being saved, so if someone physically
| steals the device, they'll have easy access to your past
| location history.
|
| [0] https://canadagps.ca/collections/gps-data-
| logger/products/co...
| comeonseriously wrote:
| Not _exactly_ what you were asking for, but I use this:
|
| https://gpslogger.app/
|
| I can export my data and then use that how I want.
| tyingq wrote:
| See UnifiedNLP
| (https://github.com/microg/UnifiedNlp/blob/master/README.md)
| <ctrl-f> down to "List of backends for geolocation".
| fullstop wrote:
| Owntracks [1] is likely what you're looking for.
|
| 1. https://owntracks.org/
| specto wrote:
| I use home assistant with their android app. It can/does use
| google location services, however I believe you can also set it
| to use gps.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Do you want a self-hosted location tracker because you don't
| want someone else tracking you? Because it's not going to help.
| Your cell company knows where you are at all times, and even
| with location turned off, your OS is reporting enough
| information to either Google or Apple at all times to know
| where you are to within a few feet.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I know I cant avoid cell companies, but I can at least limit
| how much Google knows (or any other company that requires
| always on location). The problem is though, the data I can
| get from my location history from Google is really useful for
| me so it's been a privacy trade off I've taken.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I keep Google location history on so I can have evidence of
| where I was.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| As if that was admissible. Easily faked by leaving your
| device at home.
| 0x6862 wrote:
| Paired with other metadata (which can also be faked) I'd
| bet a jury would find the data quite convincing
| refulgentis wrote:
| That's not true: when location is turned off, location is
| turned off. Apple still has a loophole where turning off
| Bluetooth doesn't turn off Bluetooth, but location should be
| "fixed"
| Forbo wrote:
| I thought the Bluetooth thing only applied from the quick
| menu. I've been told if you disable it in Settings that it
| will actually turn it off.
| judge2020 wrote:
| This is true. And when you turn it off from control
| center, it says 'disconnecting bluetooth devices until
| tomorrow', so it's clear that disabling it means "stop
| all BT connections except for my Watch".
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Your cell phone company knows the tower you are talking to
| and probably which (directional) antenna you are talking
| to. Antennas are in the process of getting a lot more
| directional with 5G, so they'll soon go from trivially
| being able to track you within a block or two to within a
| meter or two.
|
| It's not great.
| PeterisP wrote:
| The core records of a cell phone company are at a cell
| level, which often are configured in a 120-degree sectors
| from a tower.
|
| If they really want, they can see the distance from the
| tower because that's a requirement for the communications
| protocol to work (LTE at least expects to account for
| lightspeed delay in allocating transmission slots) and
| gets measured during the communications, so the operator
| should be able to see that distance to the granularity of
| something like 100m (or is it less nowadays?); but AFAIK
| that's usually not stored unless you're in a 911 call or
| perhaps with some tracing warrant.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| These newfangled beamforming systems can alter the
| direction of transmission to optimize signal quality for
| your phone. How can they do that if the system cannot
| locate a handset with great accuracy?
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Beams don't have to be that accurate to boost signal
| quality.
|
| This is also speculation on my part but I'd suspect
| they're targeting specific clusters of devices in an area
| and using multiplexing than having dozens of radios on
| one tower.
| DeWilde wrote:
| Cell phone towers can still track you, unless you don't
| have a SIM card.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Until mmWave 5G becomes the norm, LTE towers aren't as
| accurate as the GPS data obtained by Google. The
| difference between 30 meters of accuracy[0] and a few
| meters with Galileo/GPS[1] could be the difference of a
| search yielding everyone in one building and finding
| everyone in the neighboring buildings on the same block.
|
| 0: https://www.marketingdive.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/ne
| ws/res...
|
| 1: https://www.deingenieur.nl/artikel/after-13-years-
| galileo-sa...
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| They can still track the device by IMEI, because the
| radio connects to the base station. SIM is only necessary
| to register on a network. You can still call emergency
| services even without a SIM.
| progman32 wrote:
| I have played with storing location history using Home
| Assistant. Works, data never lands anywhere other than my home
| server.
|
| EDIT: I use it to do home automation actions depending on where
| I am. I.e. when I leave, it automatically arms the alarm and
| turns off the lights.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I never thought about using HA to log location. I already use
| HA so this might make the most sense.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| Look at Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) you will find
| lots of tools related to telemetry.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| There's https://owntracks.org/, which has iOS and Android apps
| and instructions on setting up your own server. If you run
| NextCloud self-hosted already, there's PhoneTrack
| (https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/phonetrack), which has a list
| of supported/suggested apps that send data back to it in a
| compatible format.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| This also has integrations for home assistant to use
| owntracks for logging and automations for smart home stuff
| too.
| kelnos wrote:
| I've been using OwnTracks (plus ot-recorder) for a few years
| now, in parallel with Google's location tracking/timeline,
| and I find that OwnTracks tends not to update all that well
| or frequently.
|
| If I switch OwnTracks to "move mode", it's great, but then it
| drains battery like crazy. "Significant changes mode" doesn't
| really cut it to map out my track as I move around during the
| day. And it's especially annoying because I do have it set up
| to trigger some lights to turn on in my house when I get
| within 500 feet of home. Sometimes it'll finally trigger an
| hour or two after I get home, which isn't particularly
| useful. I've exempted the app from Android's "battery
| optimization" thing, and I'm using a Pixel 4, which shouldn't
| have any shenanigans like killing background apps frequently
| like some other manufacturers do.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| Ah, that's good to know. I've been meaning to set up
| OwnTracks with iOS, so I'll report back with how that goes,
| see if the accuracy/battery tradeoff is any different from
| what you're seeing on Android.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| > I'll report back with how that goes
|
| Out of self-interest, where would one check to
| (eventually) find this write-up? Sounds like OP hadn't
| known just how long OT takes to update on Android, which
| makes me assume other information out there may be out of
| date, or someone else's best case scenario (as opposed to
| real-world usage).
| barbazoo wrote:
| I use Google location sharing with my partner so we know
| where the other person is. Is owntracks a replacement for
| that by any chance?
| galbar wrote:
| Yes. I use it with my whole family. You can create a
| tracking session and have everyone join in. From the app
| and the website you can see everyone on the map.
|
| The only trouble Iue had is that the Android app sometimes
| crashes and I have to manually launch it again. There are
| other compatible apps that I haven tried, though.
| MrOwen wrote:
| If you connect OwnTracks to an mqtt broker, there is a
| feature to track friends. But I haven't played with that
| part so ymmv.
| noptd wrote:
| I'd hope not. We should normalize less surveillance, not
| more.
| barbazoo wrote:
| How is it surveillance when two consenting adults share
| their location with each other using a self hosted
| service?
| MrOwen wrote:
| Yeah, knowing my SO's location is super important for
| multiple reasons imo... Primarily safety and knowing how
| long it will take to get back from someplace (or how long
| I can keep messing around with stuff at home). I'm sure
| there's other valid reasons but kinda just provides me
| peace of mind.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Consent is not a simple binary thing.
|
| Creating expectations around accepting surveillance is
| not healthy.
| mercora wrote:
| does it work both ways? can i present this data as an alibi when
| i need one? if its not deemed accurate for that why would it be
| considered for evidence? and if it is that seems like free alibis
| for everyone guilty or not ;)
| daenz wrote:
| Which do you think is more important? Needing to present an
| alibi in the case of you being wrongly accused? Or needing to
| conceal your actions in a world where something new has been
| made illegal?
| jonas21 wrote:
| The former is more important. At least in the U.S., _ex post
| facto_ laws are unconstitutional, so you don 't have to worry
| about concealing past actions when something new is made
| illegal.
| daenz wrote:
| Strong disagree and I think you're looking at it at too
| small of a scale. Your phone monitoring your location is a
| placeholder for tech knowing what you do in your private
| life. The tech is just going to get better than your phone.
|
| Put it this way, if you had cameras watching you every
| moment of your life, you could have the perfect alibi for
| anything. But you would never be able to do anything
| considered illegal again, for whatever definition of
| "illegal."
| vkou wrote:
| Which do you think is more important? An innocent person
| being able to prove their innocence, or a criminal being able
| to conceal their crimes?
|
| The entire millenium-old body of law surrounding what rights
| you have when dealing with the police exists in order to
| protect the innocent, not the guilty.
|
| Things like warrants don't exist to make it impossible for
| the police to do their work. They exist to make it so that
| they spend _less_ [1] time harassing people who have done
| nothing wrong. It's difficult to frame the police scooping up
| data that a third party has on you as harassment.
|
| [1] But not _no_.
| daenz wrote:
| >or a criminal being able to conceal their crimes?
|
| What if I made something that you like to do illegal? Now
| you are a criminal concealing their crimes. Now your tech
| works against you and you must comply.
|
| I absolutely agree with erring on the side of letting
| criminals get away with more if it means preserving
| privacy. No alibi safety net is worth trading away your
| privacy.
| vkou wrote:
| > What if I made something that you like to do illegal?
|
| Pointless red herring. For any law, we can find someone
| that doesn't like it. Building an argument about police
| powers from that is building on quicksand.
|
| Unless you mean to do away with law, and the concept of
| crime in general.
| daenz wrote:
| You missed the point of me saying that which was a
| response to your flippant "protecting criminals is bad"
| suggestion. Many crimes are only crimes not because the
| oppose some fundamental morality, but because some
| legislators felt like making them crimes.
|
| I noticed you didn't address my point around erring on
| the side of not infringing on privacy however. Does this
| mean that you agree?
| mercora wrote:
| i just tried to point out this data should be useless for
| prosecution. this could easily be faked to make up an alibi
| when you are correctly accused of something.
| pixl97 wrote:
| In the US you are innocent until accused. Police
| organizations and the FBI love to come in and question the
| people around you with very pointed questionnaires that can
| make it seem like you are a very bad person.
|
| The number of guilty people that get off by it would be
| irrelevant compared to the number of innocents that become
| stigmatized by their peers.
| nullc wrote:
| They've been doing this for going on 20 years now.
|
| Long ago someone stole a $1000 note out of a safe. Local
| sheriff's office asked Google for everyone in the area that
| recently did a search for them--- got back pages and pages of
| results because some TV show had an episode about them.
|
| If your search history doesn't give you anxiety you're not
| cynical enough.
| darthvoldemort wrote:
| If I don't allow my search history to be stored by Google, can
| police still search it?
| rastafang wrote:
| A safe guess would be that Google only hides it from yourself.
| judge2020 wrote:
| No protections occur when private citizens (or companies) give
| up information to police voluntarily, so the police aren't
| "searching" anything, in the legal sense of them needing
| probable cause to obtain information on you.
|
| The only way to stop them from getting anything from Google is
| to not use Google (and Bing, Yahoo, etc). If Google can tie
| incognito searches to your name (eg. via IP association), they
| likely will turn it over in these data requests.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| it will end up as a cat and mouse game
|
| surely poeple who are up to no good, would just turn off their
| phone - possibly taking the battery out or placing it in a foiled
| bag.
|
| or give it to another person or even hide it somewhere else
|
| doesn't seem very hard to circumvent
| Syonyk wrote:
| Or just leave it at home.
|
| But then there's the flip side of that, which is that if you
| always have your phone... _except_ when you 're up to no good,
| the courts could potentially use that to indicate that you
| planned on going out for no good.
|
| It's a far better habit to regularly leave your phone at home
| somewhat randomly. I no longer take mine into town every time,
| half the time deliberately, half because I just legitimately
| forgot. I've de-fanged my phone, leave it on the counter
| instead of in my pocket, and have moved back to a flip phone
| (week long battery life!), so it's not that much of a loss -
| but I've had to work to get there. 6-7 years ago, realizing I'd
| left my phone behind was very much a panic moment. Even though
| I grew up before them.
| gknoy wrote:
| The issue is if you're doing something illegal that you don't
| know are illegal, but are one of the small number of people in
| the geofenced area. We don't even have to be guilty, the police
| just have to _think_ you are guilty for them to make you have a
| bad day.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| The vast, vast majority of criminals are too dumb to do any of
| that.
| mywittyname wrote:
| People have gotten away with heinous crimes for decades, only
| to ever be caught by chance. There are a staggering amount of
| unsolved murders and missing persons who have never been
| found. Even white collar crimes with clear paper trails can
| go on for decades.
|
| As long as you're not committing a high profile crime, and
| you make a informed effort to minimize and/or erase as much
| evidence as possible, you're pretty likely to get away with a
| crime.
| nitrogen wrote:
| The ones that get caught, at least. I worry that availability
| bias makes it hard to know what "true" crime looks like, so
| we end up chasing the wrong things.
| pessimizer wrote:
| But we don't need new tools to catch criminals who were
| always easy to catch.
| titzer wrote:
| 1. Turn off Google location history.
|
| 2. Disable all Google apps' access to your location.
|
| 3. Disable Android's "high accuracy location" if possible in your
| Android version. This little snitch collects terrifyingly precise
| "anonymized" location information fused with device sensors.
|
| Do not accept surveillance in the name of convenience. And don't
| let Google normalize even more intrusion into our lives. Don't
| use their services.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| And, I might add, consider GrapheneOS and CalyxOS as
| alternative operating systems for your Pixel phone.
|
| https://grapheneos.org/ https://calyxos.org/
|
| GrapheneOS is more security-focused, CalyxOS is more privacy-
| focused, and they're both a step in the right direction.
| [deleted]
| Razengan wrote:
| And whenever you sign into any Google app or service, delete
| all Google cookies afterwards, to prevent the automatic shared
| sign-in into Google Search.
|
| Fuck that scummy pattern really.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I actually prefer auto-sign in. I don't want to do the whole
| 2-factor rigmarole in a dozen different apps. Perhaps they
| can make it an option though.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| Phones are a liability.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Especially for criminals.
| [deleted]
| bequanna wrote:
| ...or anyone who opposes the politics of the current regime.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Like homosexuals, insulters of the King, and apostates.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Phones are a liability
|
| them: I'd like you to carry this tracking device with you
| everywhere you go. It tracks your location down to a few
| meters. It tracks who you talk to and records your
| conversations. It tracks what you spend your money on. It sends
| us all this information, we save it, and provide it to the
| government when they ask. How about that?
|
| us: That's Orwellian. It's a complete violation of privacy and
| likely illegal. I would never consent to that.
|
| them: You can take selfies with it and play Cow Clicker on it.
|
| us: I'll give you $500 for it.
|
| them: There's a more expensive version where when people
| message you you can see if they are using the cheap version or
| the expensive version.
|
| us: I'll give you $1000 for the expensive version.
|
| them: The "pro" version takes better selfies.
|
| us: I'll give you $1500 for the "pro" version.
|
| them: You can only store 75,000 selfies on the "pro" version
| but you can upgrade to storage for 300,000 selfies.
|
| us: I'll give you $2000 for the upgraded version.
|
| them, 6 months later: There's a new tracking device out, it's
| the same as the one you have but it comes in Sierra Blue.
|
| us: I'll give you another $2000.
|
| them: But wait! There's more!
| midnightGhost wrote:
| I remember that story about Zachary McCoy. This whole thing
| continues to get worse quick and will continue to get worse. I
| know people say we need legislation and regulation on data
| privacy and tech companies which we do. But before that gets
| taken seriously (at least in the US) it's going to take something
| real scandalous done by tech companies and actually affect the
| common folk where they actually start to care.
|
| Right now the average user does not care at all about security
| and privacy except the small niche groups of us on HN, Reddit and
| other tech/Geek forums. The regular average user will continue to
| still use Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple etc. As long as the
| average user keeps using their services and vote with their data
| and wallets I doubt much will change anytime soon.
|
| Until we get some real data privacy laws and regulation we just
| have to matters into our own hands. I don't use Google search
| unless I need to, and always have my VPN on (Mullvad).
|
| Edit: Then again, once we did get data privacy laws and
| regulation could we actually trust the companies and politicians
| and LE. Probably not. That's why I also feel the laws and
| regulation needed for tech is more of like a "The public thinks
| we did something" type of situation. There will still and always
| will be under the table deals.
|
| If the regular user can realize eventually how they feed these
| companies with their data and what happens with their data it
| could also hinder or start to hinder data collection at the
| government level (NSA, GCHQ, Project Raven and so on).
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| What about raising money to buy a bunch of data from, say, the
| Washington, D.C. area and then de-anonymizing it. I wonder what
| we'd learn...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I wonder how a different tactic would fare:
|
| 1. Buy some legit(ish) dataset for marketing purposes. I hear
| DMVs in the US like to sell people's data.
|
| 2. Do a direct marketing job: send every single person in the
| dataset a snail mail letter with a printout of all the data
| you have on them, and a reference to where you got it from. I
| hear USPS offers good rates for bulk spam campaigns; they
| apparently live off it.
|
| That sounds like something that is in range of crowdfunding
| money, could possibly be fully legal, and sidesteps the issue
| of news outlets killing the message, with (as I recently
| heard) their policy of not reporting data from leaked
| datasets.
| evilos wrote:
| This would cause so much chaos and probably result in
| thousands of divorces. Maybe we could get a lawyers group
| to front the money lol.
| bradlys wrote:
| I really doubt legislation would come into effect. Instead,
| the people organizing the effort will be hunted down,
| prosecuted, and turned into examples of what happens when you
| try to fuck with people in high level government positions.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Has happened with grindr a few times that I know of.
| https://accesswdun.com/article/2021/7/1024075
|
| And the Strava on military bases thing.
| https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-
| bases-f...
| slownews45 wrote:
| HN is pretty out of touch I think.
|
| When I talk to non HN crowd.
|
| * Apple's efforts around blocking CASM are applauded
|
| * Folks are GLAD that cops are using tech to catch criminals
|
| * Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will
| help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do
| imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners /
| cookies popups etc).
|
| It would be interesting to look at other countries where the
| govt has gotten more hands on with regulations in this area
| (data retention etc). I know in some spaces I've seen the
| regulations actually end up REQUIRING retention of records, or
| the liability risks require retention of video for a long time
| (ie, railroads have REALLY dialed up use of video given the
| claims they were facing in terms of running into people - once
| they started tracking a retaining a lot more - claims went way
| down - not saying folks were lying before but they are going to
| push back on getting rid of their data collection at this point
| unless laws change).
| sjwalter wrote:
| I dunno, I mostly agree with you, but I think lately, at
| least with my family and friends, the coronavirus political
| response has made many more people much more skeptical about
| centralized authority figures.
|
| The narrative that is commonly recounted is that it's obvious
| that the people in authority are either incredibly
| incompetent or crazily power-hungry, and both are leading
| many of my family and friends to question everything. I mean
| total normies who are otherwise just typical taxpayers.
|
| It's funny in a Kafka kinda way to witness the slow erosion
| of trust in institutions.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I love institutions. Just seems to me and
| basically everyone I know that the people who should know the
| most about how trust is built, do everything possible to kill
| off that trust.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| What fundamental problem do you have with cops using tech to
| catch criminals?
|
| Not talking about the abuse of innocents here, or warrantless
| intrusions into your data, just the core of what you're
| saying.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| What is really surprising is law enforcement actually
| investigated a burglary and went as far as requesting data from
| Google.
| sixothree wrote:
| I'm guessing the victim was in law enforcement.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| Geofence warrants are analogous to getting a warrant for the
| check-in log at a hotel after a guest is murdered. So long as
| there is probable cause, this should not be a legal issue. See
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/probable_cause:
|
| > A judge may issue a search warrant if the affidavit in support
| of the warrant offers sufficient credible information to
| establish probable cause.
|
| When you use these types of technology, you are essentially
| checking in everywhere you go.
| nullc wrote:
| Geofence warrants are more analogous to getting a warrant to
| check the surface thoughts of everyone in a certain area.
|
| We just don't yet have brain implants allowing our corporate
| overlords to directly log our surface thoughts yet, for now
| they only capture them via backscatter in our search queries.
| the-dude wrote:
| Not in my hometown in The Netherlands. We had a high profile
| murder by stabbing, a suspect and the police was denied the
| information you are talking about ( I think ).
|
| The case was high profile because the victim was in his early
| twenties and seemed to be stabbed 'at random' during his
| jogging.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| Do you know why the information was not provided? What legal
| basis?
| ziddoap wrote:
| Not agreeing or disagreeing, but the essential nuance here is
| your last few words: you're now checking-in literally
| everywhere, at all times. This makes the analogy of a hotel
| logbook a bit less apt (well, a lot less).
|
| If I check into a hotel, I'm not _also_ checking in to every
| other store /attraction/place on that trip, as well as every
| few steps I take, as well as every place that I look up on a
| map to see if I want to visit (i.e. search history).
| sneak wrote:
| Reminder: Turn off location services/GPS systemwide to opt out of
| these databases. The subscriber location tracking performed by
| cell towers is much lower resolution.
| [deleted]
| tsjq wrote:
| google android tracks location even when gps off
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+android+tracks+location+eve...
| ghastmaster wrote:
| It tracks which towers you are connected to according to the
| article. No triangulation or precise location.
| greenhatman wrote:
| If it tracks signal strength as well, then it's just one
| extra step to triangulation.
| inetknght wrote:
| Cell phone tower triangulation has been around for so long
| that there's decades-old movies to its effect. To claim
| that there's no triangulation in current tech is, IMO, an
| intentionally malicious claim.
| tpmx wrote:
| Tricky to use e.g. Google's Waze then.
| Syonyk wrote:
| So don't.
|
| Check traffic before you depart, pick a route, and leave some
| extra time in case you hit unexpected traffic.
|
| I know I've been going on about it lately, but for almost
| every "How can we possibly do this without an app tracking
| every bit of data it possibly can?" sort of task, people were
| doing that, or something functionally equivalent, before cell
| phones, or on cell phones that aren't actively user-hostile.
| uhtred wrote:
| OSMand is open source and really good for navigation. It's
| on f-droid.
| sneak wrote:
| Checking traffic before you depart also leaks your
| location, as well as your intended path of travel.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| It can not be used to prove that you actually did travel
| though. You can also put in only approximate address
| locations.
|
| Google isn't going to be running some inference algorithm
| to identify your most probable location or residence,
| they are just going to give LE the raw data. Unless you
| are a extremely wanted criminal, LE probably doesn't have
| the resources to do extensive analysis of google maps
| searches and a jury is not going to interpret those
| results the same way they would of actual location
| history.
| sneak wrote:
| If you get to the point where a jury is evaluating
| anything you have already lost.
| ghaff wrote:
| Smartphones are useful but 15 years ago really weren't the
| Dark Ages because no one had a modern smartphone in their
| pocket. Even 25 years ago--before most people had cell
| phones at all--really weren't wither.
|
| Yes, I carry and use a smartphone. But it's a convenience.
| I don't need to reach people or have them reach me wherever
| I am. I don't need GPS at all times. I don't always need
| instant access to information.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| The only foolproof method is to stick your phone in a Faraday
| cage both going to and leaving the location you want private,
| right? Or cage it and leave it at home?
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Things are probably not quite there yet, but...
|
| How about a real-time analysis of all security camera footage
| and everyone's photos and videos, using face recognition and
| other techniques (movement, clothes associated with a person
| etc.). Cars are tracked via license plate, if they are not
| online now anyway. You pay cash but "they" know the serial
| number of the bill the ATM gave to you and which shop owner
| gave it back to the bank a little later.
|
| There are probably many patterns that are only known to
| people who do this kind of thing full time. Maybe there is a
| very small number of people who buy the very same two items
| at a gas station. If Amazon knows who's pregnant early, some
| will know who's trying to go private and why before they know
| it...
| jimbob45 wrote:
| >There are probably many patterns that are only known to
| people who do this kind of thing full time
|
| I agree with you. I think, at some point, the only way to
| go about doing this without inducing insanity is to get
| someone on the federal side to tell you what tools they
| have at their disposal so that you know exactly what you're
| fighting against. Otherwise, you'd drive yourself crazy
| with tinted windows, license plate switchers, randomized
| purchases, Faraday cages, and more.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| I can't find it now, but I read an article about the Capitol
| riot that said the FBI was actively looking for individuals
| whose phones followed the pattern you describe. Traveling
| towards the Capitol on Jan 6, going dark, later coming back
| online is perhaps an indicator the person didn't want to be
| observed at the Capitol. Likewise, traveling to D.C., and
| leaving the phone at the hotel all day, then moving in the
| evening was an indicator the person may have been at the
| Capitol.
|
| I bring this up to say, Faraday cage and leaving the phone
| behind may not even be enough with a sufficiently large
| surveillance state.
|
| Edit: leaving the phone at home is different than a hotel, of
| course. But even that might raise too much suspicion unless
| you frequently, and randomly, leave it at home. That way the
| lack of movement wouldn't necessarily indicate you didn't
| want to be tracked at a particular moment.
| [deleted]
| jimbob45 wrote:
| I heard the same thing from Alan Dershowitz on Preet
| Bharara's podcast. I think you'd certainly need to keep
| your phone dark for long periods of time prior to the event
| and possibly have someone briefly unsheath it from the cage
| for plausible deniability. Even so, you're only ensuring
| that the prosecution can't use _that_ piece of evidence
| against you - you 're not exonerating yourself entirely by
| any stretch.
| yardie wrote:
| The subscriber location tracking performed by cell towers is
| part of the e911 system. It's pretty accurate by design. Now
| how much and how long that data is retained is up to the mobile
| network provider. They've had no qualms about selling it in the
| past.
| deadmutex wrote:
| I am skeptical of using only technical solutions to non-
| technical problems. It rarely scales, IMO.
|
| Disclaimer: Work at Google, but opinions are my own.
| privacyisntdead wrote:
| Agree. If we had better privacy laws, this wouldn't be an
| issue.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Cops don't care about the privacy laws which already exist.
| (See: parallel construction.) If we had better privacy
| laws, they would just get sneakier.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Yup, and even so, it's up to the defendant to prove
| themselves innocent, which will take tens of thousands of
| dollars just to get to the point where a judge throws the
| case out.
| upofadown wrote:
| Cops care deeply about what privacy laws exist. That
| still limits what data they can legitimately get access
| to. In this case they could of used a Stingray or
| equivalent but:
|
| * They would not of known where to place it before the
| crime took place.
|
| * Even if they somehow got the data about the location of
| the cyclist under the table they would have had no way to
| parallel construct anything.
|
| Since there was no other evidence that would of been it.
|
| This is not a new thing. The authorities can open and
| read your mail as much as they want using bamboo splints
| and/or the steam from a kettle. But because it is very
| illegal to do that it greatly reduces the abuse possible
| from such actions.
|
| Privacy laws are a prerequisite and are essential.
| belter wrote:
| 4 layers of Aluminium foil :-)) https://youtu.be/tVFJJEiJ1C0
| dylan604 wrote:
| Oh my the comments for that video are fun
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| During school some friends and I lived above our landlord who
| prohibited Wi-Fi, saying it gave him headaches. One time I
| accidentally used the Wi-Fi adapter for my Xbox 360, and he
| came up a half hour later with a sniffer demanding us to shut
| off the source. Never figured out if it actually caused him
| headaches, or if he just didn't want any sources on around him.
| He later moved to the middle of nowhere in West Virgina, and I
| remember reading a few months later about a community out there
| that surrounded themselves with a Faraday Cage.
|
| Wonder if anyone ever told him about radio waves...or light in
| general.
| judge2020 wrote:
| EHS (electromagnetic hypersensitivity) has no scientific
| basis whatsoever. There have been blind studies that show no
| correlation between such exposure and supposed symptoms[0],
| so anyone with symptoms might only have a subconscious
| psychological response to knowledge of being around EMF.
|
| 0: https://doi.org/10.1097/01.psy.0000155664.13300.64
| yardie wrote:
| There is the National Radio Quiet Zone [0] around the Green
| Bank Radio Observatory in West Virginia. But there isn't a
| giant Faraday Cage. That would be stupidly expensive to
| build. I met a few people who willingly moved to the area to
| get away from perceived RF radiation for health reasons.
| Transmitters aren't banned but they are highly regulated to
| run at limited power.
|
| The same area is also popular with pot growers so you get an
| interesting mix of hippies, potheads, preppers, and people
| like your landlord.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radi
| o_Q...
| rastafang wrote:
| I think that to efficiently block signals, the aluminum needs
| to be grounded? IE: Like a Faraday cage
| motohagiography wrote:
| At some point it's going to click that the issue isn't the
| technical confidentiality of data, it's the people who leverage
| it against you (and those who enable them) who are the real
| problem.
| ir77 wrote:
| Is this only unique to Google?
|
| Serious question - I switched from google to iPhone exactly for
| the tracking reasons, but I would think that apple does have
| similar data - if you have weather widget it must ping something,
| same thing with Maps and that's not even accounting if you allow
| gps to set your time zone or collect traffic data.
|
| Are the cops not searching apple data? Is it just not public
| enough? Or is the data pretty poor even if they wanted to search
| but can't.
| graeme wrote:
| According to this from 2018, no, Apple isn't storing that data.
| At least if this release is comprehensive, and it seems to be.
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r...
| dudus wrote:
| In theory this data is also available from carriers. But Google
| can keep record of your gps if you enable that. I think
| switching to apple is a bit of overreaction over this. You are
| able to disable location tracking on Google.
| ir77 wrote:
| Yes, you can, but then you can't use google assistant, not
| even to dial your favorite contacts and you constantly get
| harassed by google to enable it, this was also on a pixel
| phone.
|
| Google assistant couldn't even make a call with the allo app,
| there were many reasons I switched. Actually I was always and
| iPhone user and tried pixel 2 for a few month and that was
| it.
| tessierashpool wrote:
| as far as GPS, you can just turn off location tracking on
| iPhone when you don't need it. they make it more work than it
| should be, but it's not hard, and it is amazing for battery
| life.
| ram_rar wrote:
| > McCoy later found out the request was part of an investigation
| into the burglary of a nearby home the year before
|
| Just wondering, if he would have still shown up in the search
| results, if he had setup auto deleting Google data older than 3
| months.
| dang wrote:
| Related past threads. Others?
|
| _Google says geofence warrants make up one-quarter of all US
| demands_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266650 - Aug
| 2021 (259 comments)
|
| _New Federal Court Rulings Find Geofence Warrants
| Unconstitutional_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342049
| - Sept 2020 (29 comments)
|
| _Google Gives Feds 1,500 Phone Locations in Unprecedented
| 'Geofence' Search_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21773543 - Dec 2019 (269
| comments)
| twofornone wrote:
| Its only a matter of time before the wrong people get their hands
| on all the data that big tech has been unscrupulously mining for
| years now. An authoritarian's wet dream.
|
| Im typically a minimal regulation kind of guy but these orgs have
| consistently demonstrated that without some sort of effective
| privacy regulation, modern tech companies simply do not have
| enough incentive to self-regulate with respect to data
| collection. Laymen are too ignorant to demand better from the
| modern data cartel.
| Forbo wrote:
| > Its only a matter of time before the wrong people get their
| hands on all the data that big tech has been unscrupulously
| mining for years now. An authoritarian's wet dream.
|
| This is typically my go to for any discussion regarding privacy
| apathy. Citing things like the NSA's "Total Information
| Awareness" and "Nobody But Us" attitudes also does well to tie
| into this.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Data brokers have been building detailed personal profiles of
| everyone for fifty years. The Googles are just the new kids at
| the party. A major reason we don't have strong data privacy law
| is to protect this business model and maintain the surveillance
| apparatus it enables.
| badRNG wrote:
| I think there are generic non-surveillance reasons as well.
| Whenever an industry gets big enough (tobacco, oil,
| advertising) it can have enough momentum and capital to have
| its interests protected by the state to a degree that
| anything short of an energized mass movement will fail to see
| these industries regulated (a good example of such a movement
| having some success is tobacco.)
| mywittyname wrote:
| Most people don't know the names of the worst offenders.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| That's what you have in Russia, operators are obliged to
| collect and store vast amounts of data under the SORM laws, and
| then bellingcat were able to access all this data in their
| investigations, that's how they got the location trail of the
| agents that shaddowed and poisened Navalny (and others).
| Bellingcat got all that data from a black market on data, where
| low profile employees are selling access to all this gathered
| data for a couple of dimes, see [3]. I wonder if a similar
| black data market is already in place in other countries...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Poisoning_of_Alexei...
|
| [3] https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-
| fsb-...
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| already happened/Happens.
| [deleted]
| ianmiers wrote:
| This has already happened. A catholic newspaper bought
| commercial location and app data and used it to out a gay
| priest who was forced to resign. They broke the joke "privacy
| protections" by knowing his home, office, and a conference he
| went to. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/catholic-
| priest-...
| dartharva wrote:
| I've always had the habit of keeping Location services turned off
| while not in use, to conserve my phone's battery. Guess it's a
| privacy requisite now.
|
| I also remember having a habit of keeping mobile data off during
| the 3G days. Guess it's not feasible anymore.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _I also remember having a habit of keeping mobile data off
| during the 3G days. Guess it 's not feasible anymore._
|
| The biggest problem I've found lately with cell data off is
| that group texting breaks in weird ways. Most group texting is
| apparently MMS based, which is "Here's a text telling the phone
| to go download something from somewhere." If you've got data
| off, those end up queued weirdly, and can make group messages
| appear radically out of order when you get a data connection
| again.
|
| Group texting is _hard_ when you get into the weeds of it.
| izacus wrote:
| That does practically nothing for your privacy, because you're
| still connected to the base station tower which keeps logs of
| your phone roaming between base stations. And in more populated
| areas, the base stations are dense enough to be pretty accurate
| about where you were. Requests for cell tower log dumps are
| very common these days.
|
| The solution here is for governments to ban this kind of bulk
| data requests without warrant and not for you to fight a losing
| battle against your own police force.
| lrem wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, but thankfully not dealing with
| any of this.
|
| Well, it won't _stop_ the police. But the accuracy is lower,
| increasing the number of people that match the geofence. That
| changes the cost-benefit of asking for such a warrant.
| izacus wrote:
| It might be just my eastern european paranoia, but this
| just makes it easier for the authorities to put you into a
| place they want you to be, not harder.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Which is better depends on if your threat model is them
| targeting you specifically and then looking for pretexts
| or them deciding they want to target you specifically
| when looking through the contents of the dragnet.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I'm sure they can think up an excuse to not let you use
| your own location data.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >The solution here is for governments to ban this kind of
| bulk data requests without warrant and not for you to fight a
| losing battle against your own police force.
|
| That and a faraday bag.
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