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FBI is buying location data to track US citizens, director confirms
by jbegley
Who's selling the data is the far more serious issue here. Behind this is a remarkably well-structured syndicate. The supply chain looks something like this: consumer apps embed ad SDKs → those SDKs feed location signals into RTB ad exchanges → surveillance-oriented firms sit in the RTB pipeline and harvest bid request data even without winning auctions → that data flows to aggregators who don't have any direct relationship with consumers → and from there it's sold to government agencies, among others. The genius of this structure is that accountability dissolves at every layer. Each intermediary can claim they're just passing along "commercially available data." Nobody verifies whether consumers actually consented to their location data being collected and resold. The consent verification is always someone else's job. The real problem is that this data is buyable at all, by anyone, through an opaque multi-layered supply chain specifically designed so that no single entity bears responsibility for the end result.
Apple and Google are facilitating the data sales
Specifically, these big companies revenue share with app companies who in turn increase monetization via selling your private information, esp via free apps. In exchange for Apple etc super high app store rake percentage fees, they claim to run security vetting programs and ToS that vet who they do business with and tell users & courts that things are safe, even when they know they're not.
It's not rocket science for phone OS's to figure out who these companies are and, as iOS / android os users already get tracked by apple/google/etc, triangulate to which apps are participating
I'm game for throwing rocks at Apple and Google, but I don't get this one.
> consumer apps embed ad SDKs → those SDKs feed location signals into RTB ad exchanges → surveillance-oriented firms sit in the RTB pipeline and harvest bid request data even without winning auctions
Would you ban ad supported apps? Assuming the comment you're responding to is realistic, I'm not sure how the OS is to blame.
I would ban apps using unsafe ad platforms
If I was simultaneously also the owner of the ad platform, I'd fix it & knock out the bad players, or get ready to be sued for a decade+ of knowing malpractice
And if I was a US citizen seeing the companies being involved be sued for being monopolies and abusing their position, and then seeing them cry security in court yet knowingly do this for a decade+, I'd feel frustrated by successive left + right US administrations & voters
They are all unsafe. It’s a huge source of revenue for ad companies.
Neither big players have refined enough permissions. These set users up for giving away more data than they think.
Maybe one clear example is needing a permission once for setup and then it remaining persistent.
An easy demonstration is just looking at what Graphene has done. It's open source and you wana say Google can't protect their users better? Certainly Graphene has some advanced features but not everything can be dismissed so easily. Besides, just throw advanced features behind a hidden menu (which they already have!). There's no reason you can't many most users happy while also catering to power users (they'll always complain, but that's their job)
> Would you ban ad supported apps?
There's no need to ban ad supported apps when you can just ban the practice of using ads targeting users based on individual characteristics.
You trust the adtech companies to pinky promise to totally not do that anymore?
how about jailing CEO's of companies who do this?
I’m not sure that’s how corporate blame works. The ceo signed off on the CIOs proposal to streamline data analytics logs via WeTotallyWontSiphonOffYourDataAndSellIt incorporated for user improvement purposes, which happens to be owned by the CFO’s brother in law. How were the CIO and CEO to know that a third party was selling off the data, and how was that third party to know that the sale of the data to another party who then onsold the data to the fbi would be illegal?
> How were the CIO and CEO to know that a third party was selling off the data, and how was that third party to know that the sale of the data to another party who then onsold the data to the fbi would be illegal?
Ask yourself the same question about personal health data and the answer reveals itself: the CEO and CIO know (or should know) that the vendor needs to be HIPAA-compliant or it's their necks (the CEO's and CIO's), so they look for a vendor who advertises as being HIPAA-compliant.
Pass legislation to the same effect for all PII and the CEO and CIO will then make requirements of the vendor. If the vendor lies, they get fired because the company hiring them is culpable. The vendor may also be subject to civil and/or criminal penalties. It seems simple, other than the fact that we have a federal legislature with no apparent interest in solving this problem, alongside a populace which either doesn't notice or doesn't care about that.
To answer the question more pithily: communication.
This is really simple to explain:
Apple does not let you restrict app network access[1]
You have no ability to know who your app is connecting to, and you cannot select or prevent it.
[1] except maybe the cellular data toggle
Settings > Privacy & Security > App Privacy Report will at least show domains contacted by each app.
You can trace the big players
If Google & Apple & friends refused to take a rake and opened distribution, then I'd agree, net neutrality etc, not their problem
But they own so much, and so deep into the pipeline, and explain their fees to courts because "security"... and then don't do investigations. They employ some of the best security analysts in the world and have $10-30B/yr revenue tied to just the app store fees, so they very much can take a big bite out of this if they wanted.
> They employ some of the best security analysts in the world and have $10-30B/yr revenue
I'm completely with you, they could do these things if they wanted to. They have the money. They have the manpower. It is just a matter of priority. And we need to be honest, they're spending larger amounts on slop than actual fixes or even making their products better (for the user).
“Priorities” is far too soft a term in this context. These are anti-priorities: not just things they choose not to work on, but things they’ll spend big money to prevent, up to and including bribing, uh I mean lobbying, lawmakers.
Apple supposedly does this with the privacy report cards.
However, I'd be shocked if a cursory audit comparing SDKs embedded in apps and disclosed data sales showed they were effectively enforcing anything at all.
Ultimately the fact that ad sdks have such wide access to location information is a choice by the platforms. I've long wanted meaningful process isolation between the app and its ad sdks, but right now there's oodles of them that just squat on location data when the app requests it.
> Would you ban ad supported apps?
Yes, I absolutely would. Advertisements are a scourge upon people's wellbeing on top of being ugly and intrusive.
If you want to build a free product, that's great. Build a free product.
If you want to make money from your product, then charge for your product.
>Yes, I absolutely would.
And then you will get fired by the end of day.
Luckily I don't work for an ad-supported business.
How did your company and its customers find each other?
Do people really still think advertising has a legitimate function?
Really these days it's 95% psychological manipulation to get people to buy inferior quality stuff they don't need. And 5% of people actually finding what they're looking for.
Don't forget, most advertising can work fine in a "pull" mode. I need something so I go out and look for it. These days something like Google (not ideal because results also manipulated by the highest bidder). Or I look for dedicated forums or a subreddit for real people's experiences. In the old days it would have been yellow pages or ask a friend.
> I'm not sure how the OS is to blame.
Read the TOS.
If I have a free app that hits location services on the device and I sell this data, how does Apple and Google make money from me?
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Apple doesn't even allow apps to know whose device they are running on without the user's explicit opt-in permission.
Just as importantly, apps aren't allowed to remove functionality if the user says no.
You need additional permissions to do things like access location data or scan local networks for device fingerprinting.
And Facebook/Meta. Their trackers are everywhere.
It's everyone. Especially google, but all the big tech companies play in the same pool. Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta etc make money selling ads, which ultimate enables the tools that result data harvesting from everyone across the internet. I wrote a little data investigation [1] (mostly finished) that show cases how every major news organization across the globe I scanned had some level of data collection integrated. This is just one industry, but its important (as it connects back to the incentives these media organizations have, which is to make money by selling ads at any cost). The eff also released an angle in how the bidding process to buy ads is itself a massive privacy nightmare[2]
[1] https://quickthoughts.ca/autotracko/ [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/targeted-advertising-g...
cloudflare is more everywhere than facebook
Yeah, but unlike facebook, they weren't just caught making videos of people having sex then paying people to watch the videos.
Also, unlike facebook, they also weren't just caught running a dark money lobbyist network with the goal of forcing more collection of minors' private information.
facebook is evil for many different reasons, but for a government looking to spy on its own citizens cloudflare is much more attractive target. That said, I have no doubt that they're collecting copious amounts of data from both companies, either by sale or by force.
Not Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax?
Or for location, the cellular providers?
There are plenty of bad actors
The interesting part is Google & Apple, as part of explaining to courts why their large app store fees are legit and not proof of monopoly positions, hid behind the security argument that they need to be the clearing house of what software runs on the devices. Except... they've knowingly punted on this one for 10+ years.
I would 100% agree that losing privacy through any utility-level carrier (credit cards, phone, OS provider, etc) should be default disallowed, and any opt-ins have a clear transparency mode with easy opt-out. At least two areas the US can learn from the EU on digital policy is digital marketplaces and consumer privacy protection, and this topic is at the intersection of both.
I think the pipeline needs to be plugged at both ends. We shouldnt allow this data to be sold without express consent. And we shouldnt allow the government to purchase this sort of data regardless of consent, protected under the 4th amendment. unless, iguess, express consent is given to be used by the government for investigative purposes, which no one would give since they dont have to under the 5th amendment
Don't forget the initial collection. Nobody is forcing these app developer to link the HarvestCustomerLocation.lib module to their app. They're doing it voluntarily, likely financially incentivized. Don't let them off the hook.
> And we shouldnt allow the government to purchase this sort of data regardless of consent
Fine, we'll force companies to allow a small little box to be added to their data center. Don't worry about what it does, but you cannot disconnect network/power to it once it is installed. Once it is operational, you'll no longer need to think about it ever again, and we recommend that you don't. You should also not talk about this box to users/customers/clients. In fact, you'd be better off if you didn't talk to your employees about it either.
There's no reason to think that this doesn't regularly happen by at least one three letter agency. It's something they've done for a very long time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A). They were willing and able to secretly redirect every last bit of data going over AT&Ts backbone into their systems back in 2003 you can bet that they have at least that much capability in place today.
It's why FB decided to encrypt in transit data moving internally between data centers. I'm guessing some TLAs were none too pleased with that. Then again, maybe they suggested a particular encryption to use so they can say they are encrypting yet not slowing down the intake either????
Especially after Snowden, if anyone does not think the US govt TLAs are trying to read every bit that crosses a wire, then they are just deluding themselves. Even before Snowden, Echelon was known for telephonic intercepts. It didn't take much imagination to take it further for internet traffic. Snowden just removed the need for imagination.
I think sale and purchase are too hard to police. Possession of data should be illegal, with a level of statutory damages that invites litigation.
I think the user should be paid for the data that is being gathered up. If we want a source of UBI for the future where AI is replacing every job, well here is a potential source to fund it.
dynamic/discriminatory pricing driven by AI leveraging all this data would just ensure that any money people got from UBI was funneled into the pockets of corporations anyway.
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I find myself uninstalling every app unless I really need it and use it. It's amazing how many apps just sit around in your life over time. get them off your phone
The greatest part of reading HN is finding out that my distrust of apps and their developers is not weird. It does make me question my abilities as a dev for refusing to partake in these reindeer games. Clearly, I am not the right type of person to do well in big tech.
The problem is that it is weird. It's the smart/right thing to do, but countless people mindlessly install whatever they're told to install or whatever looks fun. We hand mobile devices over to children who have no idea why they shouldn't, but honestly many adults are just as ignorant and trusting.
Most people I've spoken with are either thinking "Apple/Google/Government would never allow apps to do something like that!" or they think "Everyone is already doing it so why bother trying to fight it. I'd only be inconveniencing myself for nothing"
Same here. I use Firefox for everything, and uninstall all the junk via adb. Also low power mode not only for battery efficiency, but to prevent most background services from running.
> I find myself uninstalling every app unless I really need it and use it. It's amazing how many apps just sit around in your life over time. get them off your phone
That's the thing they don't just sit around, they all have run at start up and for Android I blame Google for not giving users the ability to block run at start up.
I am mostly back to my phone being with ironfox and using it for everything instead of apps. My bank works fine with it still and so far no issues with other things I need.
I do this. I also block the ad ecosystems on the device (root, adaway).
I do this as well — I also have DNS level blocking via a NextDNS profile and prefer PWAs if possible.
I’m not opening it… can it do anything on iOS?
The RTB thing has been around for over a decade at this point. What I’m not sure about is what’s being sold by car companies. I know they sell the data to insurance companies. I’m curious if the government can manage to get it as well commercially.
> What I’m not sure about is what’s being sold by car companies... if the government can manage to get it as well commercially.
General Motors sold driving data to data brokers including LexisNexus. Anyone, private or government can buy data from LexisNexus.
That's a very accurate summary.
That stupid game you installed a year ago, that's what gets you.
If you have a smartphone keep a very sharp eye on your location services, and whether they're in the state you expect them to be in. Also a great way to save your battery.
I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a headline in a few years when we find out other actors (e.g. China, Russia) have been buying this data en-masse too.
The CIA buys this data to track Putin's chef so of course China and Russia are doing the same to us.
I'd much rather be tracked by China than by anything at all with a USA presence.
As if I had a choice.
As if politicians of any party care now, in a meaningful way.
As if news orgs were ever interested in security experts who sounded the klaxons (for years and years and years).
Do you have a source for this claim?
Not sure about now, but geolocation data used to be available for purchase from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless
> Who's selling the data is the far more serious issue here.
Everyone who has it is selling that info, and nearly everyone who collects it is selling it. Until there are laws that actually protect us, we should stop giving companies our location data every chance we get and push for laws that prevent it from being unnecessarily collected in the first place.
"FBI is buying location data to track US citizens" ... "Until there are laws that actually protect us"
I don't see how we overcome that massive hurdle. It's not like those who ostensibly make the laws don't know and approve, and probably intentionally implemented that.
We now have full scale mass tracking and surveillance of the kind no one pre-9/11 would believe would have been allowed to exist in the form of the Flock cameras (of course it was an enemy Brit implementing surveillance in the USA) making anonymity quite literally as challenging as Winston Smith trying to move around without being detected to meet his love interest.
How are we going to get the de facto tyrants in the government to pass laws that materially disempower them by being unable to mass surveil everyone at any given time if they don't like what you are saying or thinking?
The problem with all the naysayers for all those decades is that once you have given up control over your own life and you have given away your rights protected by the Constitution, your enemies in the government are unlikely to simply give them back because you ask nicely. In fact, they will most likely aggressively move against anyone that even suggests that you nicely ask for your rights back.
> It's not like those who ostensibly make the laws don't know and approve, and probably intentionally implemented that.
In theory we should have to power to vote out those lawmakers and elect new ones who will pass the laws we want enacted and uphold the constitution. If we no longer have that power the founding fathers were pretty open about what was expected from us, but it isn't pretty.
There probably was a consent, buried on page 12 in the terms of use of the app they installed at the front of your chain.
I think that practice should be illegal... they know nobody reads those.
Even the "reasonable person" standard for court would probably conclude that most people would never read it.
All of it is legal, and incentivised. Is it any surprise?
US companies don't even care if something is illegal as long as they know the slap on the wrist they get will be a small fraction of they money they made with crime. Most of the time the US government just wants a cut of the action. Google alone has spent billions in fines.
*legal in the US
I don't think either issue is above one or another. Its problematic to build such databases, and it is problematic that the government is buying these services despite being forbidden from doing it themselves. Being able to buy it is a huge loophole and they all know it is a loophole and is breaking the spirit of the law.
Its like saying murder is illegal but hiring a hitman perfectly legal. Its bullshit and everyone involved in these decisions should be in jail. There is no way anybody working for the FBI can claim ignorance to the constitution.
We can hold both accountable actually, its a workaround of our fourth amendment rights and also it should be illegal to do this for the companies involved.
Explicitly outlawing the practice is good, but since they've already been participating in the violation of our rights and knowingly profiting from it there should be consequences.
I'd be perfectly fine with going after companies that sell data to the government, but I don't think it would be fair to go after companies who were forced to hand data over unwillingly, even if they didn't inform the public it was going on out of fear of reproductions.
And it’s working precisely as designed
For example you can have a truthful statement: “all of the apps that you have are constantly spying on you”
And the rejoinder is “ any given app is not specifically selling my data to specifically the FBI and so therefore it is not spying”
To which the response would be: “that is correct however the aggregate data is bundled and sold off to specifically the FBI or intelligence agencies and so there cannot be a logical differentiation between apps.”
By that point the person has downloaded another rewards app and added their drivers license to it.
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I'd really like to just have legislation to treat location data like audio or video under wiretapping provisions. If you collect my location info and convey it to a third party without my consent or a reasonable good-faith belief that I would consent, that ought to be treated similarly to recording without consent.
And consent needs to be granted explicitly for each party that might get access to my location, you can't just get blanket consent to sell my location to anyone, especially not with real-time identifiable location data.
Fair enough, but the wiretap laws are all phrased in terms of "conversation participant" -- a listener who every speaker is aware is listening. Some states require consent of all participants, others require consent of one participant.
In one-party states the consenting party has to be the one who makes the recording. In all-party-consent states, the verbal declaration that a recording is happening has to be part of the recording. It has to be verbal, so there is no "fine print loophole" -- you have to waste 2-3 seconds of everybody's time saying it out loud.
I like your idea, but the wiretap laws work so smoothly because they bootstrap off of things like "conversation participant" and "verbally granted in the recording itself" that don't carry over to location data.
> or a reasonable good-faith belief that I would consent
Don't deliberately write a loophole. No need for this part.
Good-faith is pretty narrow, mainly talking about emergencies where I implicitly could be said to have given consent, like when calling 911, or services that are close to 911 but privately administered.
The supreme court had a 5-4 decision related to this [1]. Was there something specific, in that decision, that leaves a loophole open?
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf
> Carpenter v. United States (2018) was a landmark Supreme Court case that held the government generally needs a warrant to access historical cell-site location information (CSLI) from cell phone carriers, as its acquisition constitutes a Fourth Amendment search
This is very different from buying your data from a company especially when the user consented to their location being tracked.
Too many people in these threads jumping to anti-Trump when the real issue is how quick we are to give up our our privacy to use technology and then quickly turn to shock in anger when it’s used against us.
> This is very different from buying your data from a company especially when the user consented to their location being tracked.
No, it's not 'very different'. When you sign a cellular contract you consent to all sorts of tracking and data collection, but it still requires a warrant for government to obtain.
Requesting != Buying
When this goes back to the courts you can come back to this comment and still be angry you are wrong.
Requesting or buying, the end result is the same; the government is obtaining historical location information on private citizens. Arguably, buying it is worse too. At least with a warrant there is ostensibly probable cause to support a search. Circumventing a warrant and buying in bulk means they're searching data of citizens not even suspected of crimes. And you're probably right that the courts (government) are not going to prevent the FBI (a government agency) from doing their job. That doesn't mean I'm wrong in my assessment. It means that you base your idea of correctness on an obviously flawed legal system.
Is it materialy different than a landline (in the rights signed away, not the data emitted/captured)?
You don’t actually consent (per-se) in most cases. Hence the warrant.
If you consented, no warrant would be required.
Consenting to data being collected by a company does not mean you consent to a search by the government of said data.
As noted, the company can sell it however. Which is even easier than a search, which typically requires paperwork.
They can, yes. But this is a legal loophole that the government abuses to circumvent a warrant required by the 4th amendment.
The 4th (and 5th) amendment requires warrants to compel folks to do things they aren’t voluntarily consenting to do….. Not really a loophole per-se.
Modern vehicles make disabling data collection fairly difficult. And even if it is disabled, there is no guarantee data is not being sent despite your user settings.
I would love for investigative groups to target the auto industry’s data collection practices and have meaningful legislation created and implemented as a result.
> Too many people in these threads jumping to anti-Trump when the real issue is how quick we are to give up our our privacy
Both things are very real problems.
Why is it different though? Who gets to say so?
If the SCOTUS case merely said "needs a warrant to access historical data"... it didn't say "only if acquired via specific means" (like a subpoena), right?
> The Court ruled that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the detailed, comprehensive record of their movements that CSLI provides, even though they share it with their carriers. This decision limited the "third-party doctrine," which previously suggested no privacy rights in information shared with third parties, and established that the unique nature of cell phone data requires greater protection.
Additionally, the decision was narrow, applying specifically to historical CSLI.
The issue of buying location data from a 3rd party company as part of a service has not been argued.
> the FBI has confirmed it was buying access to people’s data collected from data brokers, who source much of their information — including location data — from ordinary consumer phone apps and games
This is completely different from CSLI, you are agreeing to provide your location to these apps and games, as most require it, and, finally, a majority of these EULA state that the data may be shared with 3rd parties.
SCOTUS makes narrow rulings all the time and this is one of them.
The argument that you are expressly providing your location information and agreeing that it can/will be shared with a 3rd party who can then do as they please with your data is not a violation of the 4th amendment and will be excluded from the 3rd party doctrine.
Many people won’t agree with this, and if ever argued in a court, they won’t agree with the ruling when it’s allowed to continue.
Yeah, the loophole is always "national security" and SCOTUS doesn't enforce the law.
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The three letter agencies have a long history of ignoring the constitution, long before the Trump administration, going back to their inception, including as recent as the Biden administration [1].
[1] https://ij.org/press-release/fbi-caught-trying-to-sweep-its-...
edit: downvoters, is this not true? this is a historic problem with the agencies. This doesn't mean it's not also a problem with this administration. Two things can be true at once. I like pancakes and waffles.
This administration has also expressed an interest in using that information to persecute citizens.
Every administration needs to deal with the conflict of protection versus privacy. They all do things that privacy advocates wish they didn't.
But not since the early 70s has one been so explicit that it wants to use the justice system to punish their enemies, without even the pretense of a criminal charge.
So I think you're being downvoted over the perception of both-sidesism.
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> kinda the same technique Democrats want to use as well with their "pack the SCOTUS" campaigns. They want to shove a bunch more justices in there so they can get their way.
> I hate how weaponized each side is.
To be clear, one of these things has happened. The other has been hyped on Fox News.
It is really a stretch to "Both Sides" this issue.
> kinda the same technique Democrats want to use as well with their "pack the SCOTUS" campaigns. They want to shove a bunch more justices in there so they can get their way.
Did this take place? Or is it just a fear of a hypothetical?
Fear of packing the Supreme Court is a fear of something that the current parties have not done. There's an 1869 law that would have to be changed to pack it since that law sets the number of justices to nine. After that, they'd have to get their justices confirmed.
Well yes, but by republicans on Trumps behalf. Not allowing Obama to put a new judge forward in the last year of his term, and then allowing Trump to with even less time left in his term is just a chef's kiss of hypocrisy.
When people talk about packing the Supreme Court they're talking about adding justices so that one side (the one doing the nominating and appointing) gets a majority. It's not about filling vacancies (or blocking filling vacancies) to reach the current limit of nine justices.
The difference is that the right is actually doing this, and some parts of the left have suggested it.
I don't give the actions of one group the same weight as the opinions of some people in the other group.
There is nothing sacred about the number of Supreme Court justices, and historically there was one for each circuit, which is not the case now.
But the truth is, Democrats can win every single election this year and in 2028 and they would not be allowed to govern by this Supreme Court, which has chosen over and over again to overturn precedent and sow chaos.
Unfortunately, to arrest the slide into right-wing authoritarianism, you have to adopt their tactics sometimes.
But you don’t have anything to worry about. The democrats aren’t going to do any of this, and we’ll be in an even worse state in 2032.
That's not "kinda the same" at all. You can feel however you like about the strategy, but the constitution specifically doesn't elaborate on how many justices make up the supreme court. Article III simply states the following:
> The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.
There is a huge gulf between ignoring standing law or a supreme court ruling and ignoring precedent. One involves choosing not to acknowledge i.e. disobeying, an authority, and the other involves choosing to act differently than has generally been expected in the past. Moreover, at least in recent history, it's primarily the Republicans who began the practice of ignoring precedent, long before our slow descent into where we are now: blatantly flaunting the law. See Merrick Garland's ignored nomination or the house's recent ludicrous delay of swearing in an elected representative for just two easy examples of this.
I mean none of this in any partisan fashion. It's simply a matter of fact. The idea that the GOP and the Democratic parties somehow engage in the same level or kind of antics and are thus deserving of the same level of nihilistic apathy as some kind of moderate position is charitably tragically misinformed.
Or... kinda like... not the same technique at all, since Congress can legally change the size of the Supreme Court but Trump can't legally ignore its rulings.
Perhaps we could overturn the third party doctrine. With legislation, preferably. And while we are at it, solve the underlying issue of pervasive data collection and sharing in the first place.
Another angle I think worth attention is product developers should build tools / platforms that don't even touch user data and be open about that so consumers can choose those more. I believe people will choose privacy when given the choice more often if the product is just as good or better.
This is what F-Droid does. However Apple doesn't allow you to use it, and Google is slowly following their lead, too.
There was a great talk at the Chaos Computer Conference a few years ago how to diy this, sadly cant find it because web search seems dead nowaydays. If anyone knows, please chip in. It was a german researcher following german politicians who hilariously(scandalously?) related travel patterns
direct from the media server
https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-wir-wissen-wo-dein-auto-steht-vo...
Law enforcement should require a subpoena if they want to have location data for anyone. It really isnt a third party loophole issue.
Law enforcement should only be accessing location data if they have probable cause to believe a crime is happening. This invalidates the third party doctrine loophole and becomes an unreasonable search (and seizure of your privacy) under the 4th amendment.
Location data specifically should be treated as the most private data about a person. It should have the highest scrutiny for any access. It is more important than your financial records and medical records.
Good. If before the OS masters permitted this ad tracking—-a dirty secret of smaller developer revenue.
Now the FBI shows up to free lunch and blows up the spot. Now _everyone_ knows the ads in “free” apps are tracking you.
That's the job of the FBI - to investigate domestic crimes. But, why do private organizations so willingly participate in the tracking ecosystem? I suppose they're in the, "you have nothing to worry about if you're not doing anything illegal" camp! Hopefully they understand that they have the most to lose.
It's just business. Buy (your data) for a dollar, sell for two. It's all legal and the data brokers are mostly unknown or already-hated companies so I'd say they have nothing to lose.
I wonder if we can still buy burner phones for cash at Mondo Mart
Differential identification means you can be singled out based on profiles. Even if you don't have any accounts, big tech companies still have shadow profiles, and those shadow profiles can be linked to your offline identity, such that everything you've done that's been recorded, and everything you've done in (temporal, physical, or digital) proximity to other people who do have accounts results in a record of activities.
Sure, you can get a burner, but you have to make sure you never use it anywhere near anyone you know, that the sim is obtained anonymously, that you're never imaged by any of the ubiquitous cameras, etc. Merely having it powered on provides enough metadata to establish a shadow profile, and it's nearly impossible for a person to secure two separate identities. There's also the superman problem - the burner phone would only ever appear when anonymars is missing, and vice versa, creating a real and exploitable pattern if anyone like the FBI wanted to root around in your life. All they'd have to do is query which shadow profiles match the temporal gaps correlated with your disappearance from tracking.
There's really no escaping it. The only fix is legislation - outright banning mass surveillance, with lethal corporate penalties and long prison terms for C-Suite responsible for violations. Short of that, we live in a world that is implicitly compromised and insecure unless you have nation state level resources.
There's also the superman problem - the burner phone would only ever appear when anonymars is missing, and vice versa, creating a real and exploitable pattern if anyone like the FBI wanted to root around in your life. All they'd have to do is query which shadow profiles match the temporal gaps correlated with your disappearance from tracking.
This is nonsense. By your logic, people go 'missing' any time they are not using a computer, whether they're reading a book, in the shower, or asleep in bed.
It's not useful in a vacuum, but one of many degrees that can be combined to create a unique profile of you.
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I can't tell if these The Wire references are deliberate or a coincidence.
No doubt.
You can buy eSIMs that aren't linked to your identity at https://www.phreeli.com/
You can buy almost anything for cash.
Hell, I can get you a toe by three o'clock this afternoon -- with nailpolish.
Your German girlfriend will not be happy about it. Give her "halbe Pfannkuchen"!
No it is not the job of the FBI to to conduct mass surveillance of citizens.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
What if an investigation is based on finding the same specific people near another specific person that they're tracking, but they only know about the one person, not the others.
And by doing this they stop a terror attack?
One more thought - if they buy just data for specific people related to an investigation, the seller of the data is tipped off. If they just buy all the data, then there is no potential tip-off to the target.
You can justify anything and everything, including torturing random innocent civilians for information, under the guise of preventing terror attacks. Which is why it is a bullshit excuse.
You get a "geofence warrant." They exist and are ubiquitous. You then go to Google or any other provider and you demand the data for a specific location in a specific time window. You then use the data to capture criminals. Any other data would not meet the standards of evidence and probably couldn't be used in court anyways. It's only function is for "parallel construction."
Then again, what I _really_ want is for the FBI to prevent crime. If their only solution is to let crime happen and then use a giant dragnet to put people in jail then they are less than worthless... they are actively dangerous to democracy.
I agree with this route too.
They can get a warrant.
And by doing this they stop a terror attack?
Fuck off. This is just trying to manipulate people with fear of undefined bad thing.
What if we put cameras and sensors in every home? What if we require groups of three or more to register their gathering with the government?
What if we could torture someone to have a chance at stopping a terror attack? What if we could torture someone to find where they stashed a stolen car? What if publicizing the errant torture of innocent people is bad for public morale, so we outlaw publishing stories about it?
When does it stop?
These are basic philosophy of law questions but I tend to stand on the side of liberty from an ever more powerful government.
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For profit organizations are legally required to maximize shareholder value. Many of them will abuse the spirit of the law in order to squeeze profits where others won’t.
The FBI is violating the spirit and original intent of the 4A by creating an entire industry out of the “3rd party doctrine” bypass to the 4A. That doctrine was whole cloth created by SCOTUS and Congress has been too happy to avoid credit or blame for it to not enshrine it in statute.
>For profit organizations are legally required to maximize shareholder value.
No:
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
If something is bad when it's done illegally, it's worse when it's done legally, and even worse than that when it's done dutifully.
> But, why do private organizations so willingly participate in the tracking ecosystem?
Because it makes them money and that's literally the only thing they care about. They'd do anything for money and the only reason they ever don't do something is because it either wouldn't make them money at all, or it would cost them more money than they'd make.
It's also not new. The FBI has kept dossiers on people of interest and people in positions of power since it was founded. Easier now of course, which is a concern.
If this kind of surveillance is part of their job, why are they constitutionally forbidden from doing the surveillance themselves?
Haven't they been tapping phones since their conception?
Lemme give you an example.
Many retail sites have a "find a nearby" store function. They often outsource this to a third party...for something as silly as geolocation and geographical lookups. This third party is the one that offers its services for a discount but also siphons up your location data to sell.
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How Legal Punishment Affects Crime: An Integrated Understanding of the Law's Punitive Behavioral Mechanisms (2025)
"This article explains what these 13 potential effects of punishment are and how they have been theorized. It further reviews the body of available empirical evidence for each of these mechanisms."
Am all for it if law enforcement were held to the same standards. Plenty of cases where LE murder is simply not enforced. Thus LE becomes a haven for those seeking impunity and ability to nefariously track anyone.
Yikes. Why are private organizations so happy to participate in mass surveillance.
A lot of them don't know they're doing it. The tracking itself is embedded in dependencies of dependencies. SDKs you add for legitimate purposes. Along the way it's sent from platform to platform. Analytics, add targets, and eventually data brokers. Data brokers then sell it to other data brokers or the government.
If you're lucky, it's pseudo-anonymous. Of course it's actually not - aggregated location data is inherently not anonymous.
Yes. The french newspaper Le Monde recently did a piece on how easy it was to find every moves and the home adress of sensitive people (elite special forces, nucleat submarine engineers, president bodyguards, etc) by exploiting the free sample of a data broker.
They were stunned to see lemonde's app appeared as sources inside that excel file because of SDKs in their app.
Should be obvious: lots of money in that. Corporations are amoral psychopaths.
Because capitalism would happily burn the world to ash if the capitalists thought it would make them richer. It makes them think they are winning at life.
I have to give my age to my OS.
Yet they can't write a law to make this basic practice illegal.
Why do I feel like I'm not being represented _at all_?
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Nobody has explained to me how iOS ad SDKs across different apps can track individual users given that there hasn't been an accessible GUID on iOS for many years now.
Enough location data becomes effectively unique: There is likely only one phone in the world that averages over X nighttime hours in my apartment-complex and averages over Y workday-hours in the the same office block where I work.
That kind of pattern can be used to determine that two or more different app-identities are the same person, and anybody buying that data has a strong incentive to try it.
Which I guess is what iCloud private relay solves. But only if you pay.
So basically like a VPN or Tor? That won't defend against local code that can read location data and send it to a remote server.
Fingerprinting devices once you’re installed on them isn’t much harder than doing so in a web browser.
Have Instagram installed on your phone? Great, now every Meta-owned app _or advertiser running on their platform_ has a pretty good shot at identifying you based on IP, location, app usage, etc.
There is a ton of signal about identity available just by virtue of running alongside other apps. Screen size, OS version, and IP are pretty good proxies for unique identity, especially if all you care about is _probable_ matches.
A generation ago our leaders derided China (and Russia) for this kind of pervasive spying on it's citizens. In the US we did the same thing just increasing costs by enriching the private sector on the way. That's not better. That's worse.
I still remember people asking, "why people in [China], don't protest more actively against it?" as if they would do much better, some others arguing that it was in their "culture" not to protest, as if it would be in the US, they would do anything different: we now have our answer.
Kinda reminds me of when I saw footage online of a group of teens raiding a 7/11 store -- maybe during the BLM riots --, and a top comment was "heh, come try that in Texas ;)". Fantasizing, of course, that Texas has a unique bulwark against that behavior, probably having to do with gun ownership.
And then it turns out the video took place in Dallas.
We like to think there are all these barriers to bad things happening where we live. "I'm sure someone (not me) would stop that." But it turns out there isn't as much bulwark as we think. Or we're the bulwark, so if it isn't us, then there is nobody else.
It’s that sort of behavior— groups of perpetrators committing crimes— that allow people to justify enhanced surveillance tactics.
I think in years past people would have objected to sale of personal location data. But that was before people had videos of groups of lawbreakers overwhelming laws through organized efforts.
> groups of lawbreakers overwhelming laws through organized efforts
You're saying organized crime is new? Or videos of it?
People still say the same thing today. They just claim "its different" when it is used against them because scary China bad.
In the US we live in a bizarre world of dual expectations.
The government is supposed to follow the law, be accountable, transparent, and must operate within a constrained, circumscribed zone of activity which is debated and discussed. That's at least how it's supposed to work.
Private companies are understood as amoral sharks who have no obligation to do anything other than operate in their narrowest self-interest, and the law is used as a club to beat them back from what they so clearly want to do, and will do if at all possible. They are unaccountable to anything other than the legal system and their share price. Suggesting that they might have any further obligation is tantamount to questioning whether capitalism should exist. It happens all the time on HN.
So of course the FBI would like to keep their hands mostly clean by having one of those accepted-to-be-horrible companies gather this data and then buy the resulting trove.
The US is SUPPOSE to do that, but I have yet to see it do any of those things with anything close to regularity or consistency at any point in living memory.
We criticize the government bitterly, but when a company does the same thing we seem to say “oh well of course they did that, what can you do, it’s capitalism and the free market knows best, ho hum.”
See: the US healthcare system.
Apple should take care of this. I would pay. Sadly it has gotten to this point
What would you like them to do? They already force apps to ask for permission, give user control over when the app can even access the location (including just once), tell the user when the app has been accessing the location repeatedly over time, and allow the user the shut off location services for each app individually whenever they want. So aside from shutting off more and more possible sideband sources of location information, what else are they supposed to do?
Unless you're saying Apple is selling the location information they may have directly?
Answering my own question, they need a way for users to grant location permission only to the primary app and not any of its dependencies, as once you grant it, it's available to all code in the app. It would be great if there was some way to separate those.
They could also better enable network traffic inspection on device, so we could tell where data is going. LittleSnitch on iOS would be great.
IP is often enough to correlate things. LittleSnich or whatever is no help - oftentimes data is collected by the app/site directly, and then funneled to various systems via kafka-like brokers. In this case you always have only cobbections to something like cool-application-domain.au
Isn't this is just a naked reach around the 4th amendment?!
Yes. But AFAIK, not an unconstitutional one. Wyden agrees with you:
> Wyden said buying information on Americans without obtaining a warrant was an “outrageous end-run around the Fourth Amendment,”
America needs privacy laws for this reason (or an amendment, but good luck). Vote when November rolls around; the other piece is finding Democrats that will take an actual stance on privacy closer to Wyden's.
I think that the problem is that it absolutely does violate the constitution, we just have judges willing to defend it and say otherwise even when it clearly allows for exactly what the fourth amendment was intended to prevent.
(IANAL) I meant that statement in the sense of "in the current jurisprudence". AIUI, because the companies are willingly giving up the data, it's not a search and thus no warrant is required; companies could tell the government to take a hike. But why would they, when a buck could be made? And we treat the data as being the company's, b/c its on their servers, etc. As for when customers gave it to companies, again, this is treated as voluntary: you could have, in theory, not used that company.
Now, again, I don't necessarily agree with that position: many companies here are monopolies, or their market has so little competition that all their competitors do it as well. Also, with no downside to it, I don't see why a company isn't going to sell their customers' data, and if not them, then some company that might acquire them down the road. Futher, some companies even just outright lie to customers about this.
But again, the current government is unwilling to enforce any sort of extant consumer protection law, and much of the above boils down to "… because America has no privacy laws." So, we're back to "if you want it, vote for it". The GOP is fundamentally opposed to regulation of business, but even the Democrats have been really tepid around privacy laws and consumer protection.
The government shouldn’t be able to contract out anything it isn’t permitted to do directly itself. We should have this in the law, get rid of qualified immunity for everyone including lawmakers, and reign in the government.
This should be a surprise to absolutely no one. I think it sucks, but I also don't think it's anything new.
Yeah, if you had any faith in these private companies to not bend over backwards for the feds, I have a bridge in San Francisco to sell you
Some citizens are exempt. Wired magazine got cell phone movement data to and from Little Saint James and found a lot of visitor locations. The FBI is not interested:
https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-...
This is the reason why every company is collecting all the data they can. They can sell it to the government, which is likely still cheaper than having a bureaucratic behemoth collect that data.
I don’t thinks there’s any person who doesn’t know this information already, yet you keep seeing the same empty articles of “oh yes they collect your data using commercial apps”.. list all these apps to consumers, list the services too, list the companies that are selling them, so people will stop using them or at least limit its access. I know most social media are, but there are far more companies and apps that are willing to sell such data.
The companies handing your data over to the government are apple, google, microsoft, and every ISP, every social media platform, and every cell phone provider in the country. What now? You going to throw out every computer you own and never use the internet? When the problem exists in everything we use and depend on there is no avoiding it.
To be fair they are only doing that in order to track if his honeypot brib^de isnt cheating on him.
Might be cheaper than round the clock SWAT teams https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/us/politics/kash-patel-gi...
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tldr for anyone skimming: the key insight is in section 3
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They hate us for our freedom.
Also, isn't this breaking the constitution? It bypasses needing a warrant respectively having a objective suspicion.
> Also, isn't this breaking the constitution?
I don't think that's been of much concern as of late.
> Also, isn't this breaking the constitution? It bypasses needing a warrant respectively having a objective suspicion.
Nope.
Your personal information, when given to others, is now trash on the curb (in a literal sense, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_v._Greenwood )
Buying it just clears up the chain of custody as opposed to the NSA stealing it and reverse engineering your warrant -- OR -- using the good ole stingray.
Anti Pinkerton act: gov can't buy services it isn't legally allowed to do themselves
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code