Comment by jandrewrogers
8 years ago
I can confirm this is happening, I designed some of the analysis systems used. Contrary to what many people assume, this is not just a US thing. It is done throughout the industrialized world to varying degrees, including countries where most people believe privacy protections disallow such activity. Governments tacitly support it because they've found these capabilities immensely useful for their own purposes.
> for their own purposes
Such as?
If this also happens in the EU and is as blatant as you say it is and with GDPR and all, surely this is just waiting to blow up?
Parralel construction.
You pull the phone location records of everyone near a protest without a warrant (and no intention of using the location data in court) then you dig into them to find something unrelated to the protest you can nail them on.
That way you take out key players without it looking like a political crackdown.
Based on the discussion in this thread doing such a thing seems relatively easy.
Obligatory Orwell:
“The most gifted of [the Proletariate], who might possibly become a nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated.”
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That's absolutely a chilling effect. Just thinking about this I'm thinking back on events I've been to what what the government can infer from that. And they can probably nail us for anything now whenever they want to and it will be hard to trace it back to this kind of monitoring and analysis. The only way to avoid that would be to leave your phone at home and hope nobody records you or takes photos.
That assumes use by a malicious government, but what was described above was illegal use by private entities.
I'm pretty sure that in Germany, some of the described activities could be punished with prison time (and they certainly should).
So this is just a way to bulk identify people in a certain location at a certain time. Fairly efficient I guess but could bring up a lot of false positives, like passers by, journalists etc
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Yes, these applications are blatantly violating the GDPR: https://www.gdpreu.org/the-regulation/key-concepts/personal-...
Then it's going to get very costly for them when the EU goes after some more of that sweet sweet penalty money.
You and op work for companies you seem to fundamentally disagree with. Can you say why you don’t leave? Asking not out of judgment but to understand.
Because they will just hire someone else.
But where does that line of reasoning end? If asked to join a gang, do you agree because they'll simply find someone else?
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I am a journalist and want to know more about how hedge funds use/abuse this. Please get in touch if you have first-hand knowledge: fbajak@ap.org.
I am a journalist and would like to know more. Reach me at sfrancisbjr@gmail.com if you can help.
Do you feel guilt over creating them?
I know TV and movies have imparted upon people that there is some kind of feeling of immense guilt, or maybe you are just dishing the ubiquitous passive aggressive shaming as a weak attempt at social control, but fact of the matter is that today's devs (yes, many if not all of us here) have exponentially less qualms about what we do and support and develop (let alone even fully understand the ramifications, as has become apparent to me) on a day to day basis, than any of the soldiers or henchmen or perpetrators of the favorite historical villains we are trained to hate from early on. Reality is that to the vast majority of people that are swept up in the cult mania and are essentially blindly and instinctually following their most basic herding impulses, the actions they are taking and the things they are doing are just fine as they say "it doesn't look like anything to me".
We have thoroughly entered a pathway with an ever more narrow set of possible outcomes, none of which are good, but just as all the other past events that all the "smartest" people were warned about well in advance and who self-magnanimously proclaim how the inevitable outcomes "could not have been predicted" in to protect, at all and any cost necessary, the most important thing there is ... something so important and sacrosanct that reality and fact and intellect and rationality will be suffocated and smothered and exterminated and sacrificed the very microsecond it potentially could even maybe rear its head .... their ego and incomprehensible notion of having to admit fault or infallibility.
It is utter hubris that will be bringing about the inevitable next calamity that will, due to the ever growing and expanding size of the house of cards, collapse under it's own self-deluding weight.
Remember kids, tech fraud valuations were based on sound business and house prices could only go up; and those were just the early tremors of what is to come ... unfortunately. All manias invariable are followed by crashes, regardless of how they manifest themselves. What goes up must come down and down, farther and harder, it will come crashing the higher it climbed into the sun. Lest us forget Icarus
Icarus (IK-uh-rus) Son of Daedalus who dared to fly too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax. Daedalus had been imprisoned by King Minos of Crete within the walls of his own invention, the Labyrinth. But the great craftsman's genius would not suffer captivity. He made two pairs of wings by adhering feathers to a wooden frame with wax. Giving one pair to his son, he cautioned him that flying too near the sun would cause the wax to melt. But Icarus became ecstatic with the ability to fly and forgot his father's warning. The feathers came loose and Icarus plunged to his death in the sea.
The folly of Daedalus to not be mindful of the foolish youth of Icarus. But, do tell us of how the young of today will not cause the calamities of past generations of young who thought the too were infallible from their unearned privilege, pampered, and hedonic existence.
Should they? The vast quantity of users find it incredibly useful and have no reason to be concerned about governments or third parties being able to determine their geographic location, because governments or third parties don't generally care.
>have no reason to be concerned about governments ...
Many aren't, but everyone has reason to.
Governments change. Telling your government your religion in 1920s Germany was harmless, in 1940 many would have preferred if the government didn't have their religion on file.
Circumstances change to. In 1920 being a Japanese in the US wasn't special. After Perl Harbor came the internment camps.
And then there's the mundane stuff. You protest a government policy, someone in the government takes issue and tries to put some of these annoying people in jail.
Given that you don't know when you might become an enemy of the state it's always a good idea to keep the power of the state over its citizens in check.
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You can be upset about an aspect of a product, and seek to change that aspect, without abandoning use of the product. For example, 1.3 million people are killed by cars every year, and while we recognize the risk, we also constantly improve them through safety regulations, training and improved technology. Just because people use cell phones and apps today doesn't mean we're okay with the downsides and should stop trying to improving them.
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Mass surveillance is not really for investigating individuals.
The game being played is not '1984', it is 'Foundation'.
It is for steering entire societies, and this works far better on the boring people who think they have nothing to hide as they are the easiest to model
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Cambridge Analytica did far more with far less.
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It's not about being able to track everybody. You're right, nobody cares about that.
It's about being able to track anybody.
Any source for this claim?
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Several recent HN stories have had this kind of comment (first noticed with the Securus submission) that's a weird mix of "You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" and "They will never come for you, you're too unimportant." Is this a sustained campaign or just a way for folks who have contributed to these issues to feel good about themselves?
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It would be better if they did, yes.
If they "don't generally care", they wouldn't be collecting that data to begin with.
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1) Users get no benefit from information resale. 2) COINTELPRO
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Thank you for your contributions in making the world a little more shitty! /s
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