- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.world
In 2017, a senior French investigator returning from Milipol, the major biennial trade fair dedicated to state security, had something to confide. Shocked, he informed us he had been approached on the sidelines of the event by “an Israeli company,” whose name he did not wish to disclose, that tried to sell him a geolocation tool using advertising data collected from mobile phones.
Nearly a decade later, what once seemed like science fiction now drives a well-established industry. Today, companies offer services in advertising intelligence (Adint): By collecting the geolocation data of millions of phones worldwide from advertising markets, they promise intelligence or law enforcement agencies the ability to track individuals to within a few meters.
According to Le Monde’s analysis, around 15 companies, at least, now propose such services. Most are based in Israel and were founded by former members of the country’s intelligence services or military. Others are based in Europe and the United States. Their raw material is the advertising data exchanged and resold on online marketplaces, collected by thousands of ordinary apps, such as games or weather apps, supposedly for advertising purposes.
Adint tools are in increasing demand. More and more companies in the sector have started showcasing them at industry trade shows and specialized conferences. According to US business magazine Forbes, US immigration police ICE recently purchased an Adint tool for $5 million (€4.3 million). Such tools have been viewed and promoted as alternatives to other tracking methods, which are either more cumbersome or increasingly ineffective. However, Adint surveillance tools, which operate under lax or even nonexistent regulation, raise major concerns about personal freedoms, since any country or institution can use them against any phone anywhere in the world.
Is there an operating system one could use, like wipe a phone and write over it with a new operating system?
There is some recentish law making it a crime to change programming on your own purchased electronics though, federal felonies. Not sure how that could apply but it’s total bullshit obviously.
I’ve seen people mention linux phones but idk if there are any real options, when I get a new phone I want to try to get an open sourced one but can’t spend too much money on it.
Do you have a source, this is the first I’ve heard of it.
Oh jeez, I heard about it somewhere in print, but then on democracy now, this fall, when interviewing some woman who did some thing, trying to remember, I think she wrote a book.
It might be this, I thought it was newer though this is saying it was like 1998, to protect CD’s market share and the like, around the same time they changed a lot of things, also overturning the glass steagall and other checks on banks from the great depression that allowed banks to become national beheamouths, too big to fail, resell all of a security they write so not having an incentive to write good ones, operate in more than 3 states, combine commercial and investment banks, and the like, and otherwise turned a lot to shit at that time.
If this is what they were referring, and there might be something newer adding on, it makes it illegal to break any sort of “digital lock” on a device, written very broadly (as with all laws in the modern era, written by the United Corporations for their own interests.)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/some-electronics-repairs-are-illegal-federal-law-could-change-that/ https://www.cio.com/article/234220/surprise-you-don-t-own-the-digital-devices-you-paid-for.html
At the moment, your options are limited and you would have to expect loss of functionality that you probably expect in a smart phone.
These projects need funding to speed things up. In a sane world, non-american interests should be very interested in the success of these projects.
Americans have just as much interest in escaping the total surveillance of silicon valley parasites too. We are their first victims. We should get funding to do stuff like this. Also to create a federated sort of union of innumerable groups to cooperate on what we agree on, which could be used to do things like this.