ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day
ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day
Archive: https://archive.is/wfmdL
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Just need to financially cripple investment into companies like this. Go out of your way to march with your wallet to get impacts into their profitability.
But spying on former chancellor angela merkel is not? https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-spy-agency-tapped-german-chancellery-for-decades-wikileaks-idUSKCN0PI2AD/ https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57302806
Or maybe it’s all bad.
Has anyone set one of these up? A friend of mine just found one in a box during their move, and asked if this project was still active.
Install the android developer tools, or whatever it is that includes the adb utility. Download the software from the EFF & run the install script while your device is plugged in via usb.
Uh huh. And it will work as well as tariffs.
Wym? Stingray devices work and they're being actively utilized against the public.
Who needs a stingray when they built the backdoor right into the actual network.
Hide a bunch of burner phones in really shitty locations. Go on brownshirts, work for it.
Yeah, doing everything they can to make "land of the free" whiter.
Land of the melanin free
If the government had a right to that data they wouldn't need to pay for it, they could just subpoena it. But they don't, so instead they're paying middle men to circumvent our rights.
Yup. Look up tow truck companies, they track license plates with their readers and lease the data to police since police can't track without a warrant.
So they will know where I have been? Even though I am not American... I remember when the British government demanded that Apple give them that kind of information on all iPhone users all over the world and Apple told them to go fuck themselves.
This is some real bullshit.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/01/uk-government-tries-again-to-access-encrypted-apple-customer-data-report/ they don't know when to quit
Because they will never quit. Ever. We need to get lucky and stop them every time (and I feel powerless beyond signing some petition online and maybe making a donation), but they need to get lucky once.
And I cannot recall a single time that such laws were ever repealed. The patriot act has had some questionable efficacy and now ICE and the Trump administration want so many more additions that there is just no going back.
Even in Canada, which never had an issue with terrorism, has passed many laws heavily infringing on people's freedoms and are trying to pass the biggest one yet with Bill C-2, even though it actually weakens border protections and gives American companies far, far more ability to surveil Canadians than ever before. This is when violence and terror threats have been greatly diminishing for years (and not because of some BS laws).
This appears to suggest that smartphone makers (Apple, Google, etc.) are violating privacy agreements and selling user's private data. Has anyone read their privacy agreements lately?
Not just phone makers, but the telecom companies. Even if your phone shares no location data, it still checks in with a cell tower constantly. As you move around, so does your registration at a tower. It's accurate to about 2 miles. Match that with your known home address or work address and your location is easily guessed
Anything that polls location data can record it and sell it, probably more apps that sell it than don't.
Yup. There are dozens of these contractors in our modern surveillance state, and it’s all bought up en masse by the government (and others!) for all sorts of purposes.
Here’s a pretty good book on the subject
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/706321/means-of-control-by-byron-tau/
Trump’s executive order just made anyone who is critical of his administrations criminal conduct a terrorist by royal decree. We all should be armed and prepared to defend ourselves and our families against tyranny. They’re “disappearing” people without accountability. The pedo king literally declared war on citizens for not conforming to his dictatorship. The military was instructed to commit war crimes against American citizens yesterday. ie:raping and pillaging. Am I misreading the situation?
Nope.
He should be tried and executed for treason, but those in leadership positions in our country have betrayed their oaths. That means we all need to be armed to the fucking teeth as soon as possible.
Thanks for including the mirror, OP.
Companies that obtain mobile phone location data generally do it in two different ways. The first is through software development kits (SDKs) embedded in ordinary smartphone apps, like games or weather forecasters. These SDKs continuously gather a user’s granular location, transfer that to the data broker, and then sell that data onward or repackage it and sell access to government agencies.
The second is through real-time bidding (RTB). When an advert is about to be served to a mobile phone user, there is a near instantaneous, and invisible, bidding process in which different companies vie to have their advert placed in front of certain demographics. A side-effect is that this demographic data, including mobile phones’ location, can be harvested by surveillance firms. Sometimes spy companies buy ad tech companies out right to insert themselves into this data supply chain. We previously found at least thousands of apps were hijacked to provide location data in this way.
I really despise these practices. I don't know how people can build these tools with a clear conscience.
That’s easy. You just ignore your conscience because money speaks louder to these people.
Or you use confirmation bias to tell yourself it's an innocuous use case that won't hurt anyone.
Or you use a bandwagon argument like "everybody else is doing it, so why can't we" or "everybody else is doing it so it doesn't make much difference if we do too"
Or you use a library for ads such as the google-ads-api npm package, without checking it, so you don't realise how much data it's collecting on your users...
It’s the same for anyone who works for Meta or MS or Google or Anduril or whatever these days: you look at your comp package that’s worth roughly half a million annually, and you say
They have been paying people to not have morals for quite a while now.
I don’t know how people can build these tools with a clear conscience.
Have you seen the job market for programmers lately? It feels like it's almost all for AI slop, abusive rentier middleman business models that add no real value, defense war contractors, or all of the above at once.
That's not to say that it's acceptable for people to work those jobs with a clear conscience; it's to say that for a bunch of people the only ethical options would be to remain unemployed or leave the industry.
I've been seeing exactly that. Reading through these job descriptions is a bit depressing. I can't virtue signal my lack of morality and unthinking subservience to my potential employer hard enough to make cutoff to become "Director of AI Shilling" or a "Dark Pattern Consent Violation Engineer".
I know the kind of environments that won't work for me. This will always limit the jobs I can and can't work and I'm generally okay with that. I would love some of that bountiful defence contractor money, but I can't ethically justify doing work that harms others or limits their freedom. Advertising tech would have been a good fit for me... if I had no sense of ethics.
It's a tough realization that my gaming consoles, GPS Smart Watch, and fancy modern over-engineered car only became possible because tons of money was poured into building out related tech for defence and surveillance.
I imagine the cognitive dissonance must be really strong in someone working for some of these companies that have monetized governmentally sanctioned or corporately opportunistic civil rights abuses. Then again, we're often kept apart, working in our own little areas where we're safe from having to see the whole horrifying machine.
A proper Linux phone cannot come soon enough
As much as I would love to have a Linux phone, it will not fully help with privacy. The devices are logged into a cell tower and have a unique ID. This alone makes them trackable.
A Linux phone could theoretically use other networks. You could pipe traffic through I2P or bounce it around multiple network types with reticulum. It’s actually theoretically possible to make a community mesh that doesn’t need cellular at all. I don’t NEED to carry the entire internet with me everywhere. I can carry a device with a cache of stuff I need but for everything else I can just connect to some sort of network to fetch it when I actually need it on demand.
A Linux phone would let you do that. You can explore that possibility. Android and IPhone will never allow that because latency is shot on the alternative networks and they aren’t expensive enough to make a profit off of.
A removable physical or electronic SIM on a system that has full control of inbound or outbound traffic (linux phone) would still be a whole lot better than nothing. Imagine having a switch to reliably sever any heartbeat signals between the tower and the device at any time.
If the spyware/tracking started and ended at the cell tower it would be a good start. I'm not sure the sensor data would be sent to the tower either. It would just be a general area.
Yup, the baseband modem does what it’s firmware tells it to, and that’s entirely independent from the phone’s software. And open baseband modems to my knowledge don’t exist.
The pinephone released years ago. Flip phones with removable batteries have existed for decades. At this point its on you.
What carrier do you use with a pinephone?
Bro...my weather app is selling my data? 😦
I just wanted up-to-date travel conditions in a convenient widget. My taxes already pay for the meteorology, why do they need to sell my data too??
Plenty of FOSS weather apps out there that don't sell your data. I like Breezy Weather
If you want the weather info sponsored by your taxes, use the browser.
If you want a convenient widget, someone needs to make it, and the developer who made that widget needs to eat too.
You can either buy an app or pay with your data.
and the developer who made that widget needs to eat too.
He can eat without selling people's data.
This isn't about putting food on the table and you're a dipshit if you believe otherwise.
You can either buy an app or pay with your data.
No this implies you get a choice, which you don't. You can get it for free and sell your data, or you can pay for it...and still also sell your data. The real money is in the data, they won't give that up...ever.
If my taxes can pay to develop a website, they can pay to develop a widget.
Some choices to help would be to avoid using precise location for weather apps. Course is usually very good unless you're a weather tracking hobbyist. If you're not using ad blocking it's never a bad time to start.
Ad blocking in browser is good but combined with a DNS service that offers block lists like Hagezi's options it's great. These lists can block a lot of tracking and telemetry data and not just the ads themselves. ControlD and NextDNS are two solid options. NextDNS doesn't offer Hagezi Threat Intelligence Feeds specifically but have their own proprietary version. The company claims it covers much of Hagezi's lists but I haven't compared.
ControlD has a 30 day free trial period with two plans either $20 or $40 per year. The $40 per year option has a future called Redirect. Their description "Spoof various web services, apps and platforms to geo-distributed proxy locations and appear to be in a different country".
NextDNS has a free plan that can be used on multiple devices. Paid is $20 per year for unlimited. The catch to the free plan is it's good for 300,000 queries per month. If you get close they email a warning and if you go over the service will still work as a DNS but without the blocking. It will automatically start again the next cycle.
Here's the Hagezi GitHub but other lists are good too like OISD and AdGuard lists.
https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists
I use Ultimate but that may be too restricted for some. It will break websites and apps like FaceBook, WhatsApp, Instagram. If you use those a slightly less strict list a better choice. You'll still get protection but there's a balance to everyone's needs so do read up on each list and what makes sense for you.
All that wrapped in a trusted VPN and you're doing pretty well. Nothing is perfect and if a government power wants to know where you are this isn't going to stop them. For me that's not what this is for. I use this stuff against the ads and tracking crap everywhere. I'm not trying to hide and can't really offer much regarding that.
I'm maybe a bit over the top compared to some. If this all sounds crazy a simple ad blocker (AdGuard, uBlock Origin) in browser and course location for weather and anything else location based that makes sense is a solid start. You can always whitelist websites you wish to support via ad revenue if that's an interest.
Can I upload these lists to my PiHole?
Yes they can be used with a PiHole. I don't use one so I can't offer much for set up. On the GitHub page each list version has various links depending on the format needed for where it will be used. For example, PiHole is under the Adblock format which works with (Pi-hole, AdGuard, AdGuard Home, eBlocker, uBlock Origin, Brave (only in aggressive mode), AdNauseam, Little Snitch Mini).
In my research about this stuff I saw many people talking about these lists for their own home DNS set up. Good luck!
Is it me or are these ice goons getting fatter everyday? Are they eating the immigrants?
Meal Team 6, Fatstapo, etc.
Ever wondered what it would have been like if the gestapo had real-time awareness of every citizen's location at all times? You're about to find out.
This reminds me of something... What was it... Hmm...
And that was before the NSA leaks.
And in case it wasn't already clear enough how absurd this all is, the creeps at Palantir are now actually so brazen as to officially call one of their mass surveillance systems "Project Gotham"...brave new world.
They already have it
This will not help sale of smartphones.
This will not affect sale of smartphones.
FTFY
Exactly. 99.9999% of consumers don't give a fuck as long as they can still access Facebook and TikTok.
Looking forward to joining you guys in the upcoming rebellion.
But I am le tired
Ok take a nap....
But then fire ze missiles!
Hmm can't seem to load the archive site so haven't read the whole thing. Anyone know details of how this works? Are we all fucked if we have a phone or is staying off social media and hardening security with something like Graphene OS enough to keep you out of their system?
GrapheneOS already runs google play services in a sandbox that doesn't have core access to the device's functionality (you can lie about giving apps storage access or location data, for example), and because you already have alternatives to ad-based services (CoMaps, Thunderbird, etc...) you should be safe from telemetry often hidden inside of popular apps like Google Maps.
Nothing's bulletproof, of course, but the difference with GrapheneOS is that you can see what's going on, grant permissions selectively to certain apps, or opt out entirely by only installing F-droid apps or using Graphene's FOSS suite. You don't have pre-baked telemetry at all, so nothing for them to harvest.
I think we all need to spend time on the privacy and security channels here. There are ways to resolve this data leaking. Also simple settings on your devices
I track the location of hundreds maybe thousands of phones every day for minutes at the time. I see people using them while I commute. Where can I collect my fee from the US government for my services?
I own my data so let's meet where you can pay me what you owe me.
And they say there's never any good news.
Good luck buying your spyware with a frozen budget
Their budget, like the military, won't get frozen IIRC. Something about being in the Defense Authorization Act I think.
It's already paid up. They've basically got a piggy bank with 10 bil in it.
As someone with nothing to hide, I'm ok with this.
Edit: Bunch of perverts, sexual harassers, and scammers on lemmy huh? Only cements my stance on increased police presence....
You’ve deleted a lot of comments for someone who doesn’t want to hide anything.
Cool, let me see all your usernames and passwords then.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
[Cardinal Richelieu]
Scrolling through your comment history I see at a glance you’ve deleted several of your own comments so you have at least something to hide
What's legal today might be illegal tomorrow. Short sighted comment.
Take your clothes off then, and burn them, if you've 'got nothing to hide'. Let's see your address and ssn. Where do you work, and what position do you hold?
Oh, suddenly you have changed your stance on the matter... funny how that works.
Try searching for yourself and let the realization and dread set in that most of those hypothetical questions I just asked, I can find out, without needing to ask you directly - because you've given them away, while having 'nothing to hide'.
Please set up a live camera in your house for us to watch 👀
Missing /s?
As someone with nothing to hide, I'm ok with this.
Do you want to live in 1984? Because this is how we get to 1984.
dum-dum
Forgot the /s ?
If I took this argument in good faith, also consider your behaviors can be used against you and your neighbor. I've heard people say TikTok knew they were bisexual before the user themself knew it. Massive amounts of data on human behavior can be used to sell you the newest phone or the newest infringement of your rights.
What's your bank account information? /$
Hey everyone, the name caller above is going to give the police state a big ol' bear hug after recess is over. Why has Lemmy forced their hand like this?!
Of course the US Government is using Israeli Spyware to track American citizens.