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Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics (www.404media.co)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

242 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Privacy advocates got access to Locate X, a phone tracking tool which multiple U.S. agencies have bought access to, and showed me and other journalists exactly what it was capable of. Tracking a phone from one state to another to an abortion clinic. Multiple places of worship. A school. Following a likely juror to a residence. And all of this tracking is possible without a warrant, and instead just a few clicks of a mouse.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Apple and Google can fix the problem. Apps are required to ask for permission to access location information. Most of the time, it's for tracking and analytics, not anything related to the app's functionality. That's the data that is leaking to these data brokers.

In those cases, if asked, user can say no, but apps keep haranguing you until you capitulate.

Instead, the OS could add a button that says: "Yes, but randomize." After that, location data is returned as normal, but from totally random locations nearby. They could even spoof the data clustering algorithms and just pick some rando location and keep showing returns to them, or just trade the data from one random phone for another every N days.

You do this enough and the data will become polluted enough to become useless.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

Apple and Google want to sell that data, they're not going to help you obscure it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don’t think this would be technically useful to prevent exploitation of location data. The handset always has to identify to a tower using the SIM card, which is going to identify the phone and its user. Your cellular service provider can still sell this information to data brokers.

With that said, I would love the option to lie about my location to apps that have no business knowing it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

You have the option to spoof/fake/mock it manually with an app. This one, it seems, even has some available add-ons for mocking UnifiedNlp data and more...)

Mock my GPS (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location/

Mock my GPS UnifiedNlp Backend (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location.service.microg_nlp_backend/

Mock Silently (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location.silently/

Possibly you'll have to enable dev options and set the location spoofing app in there. At least, I remember seeing the option in there, but that was years ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

This changes location reported to applications by the OS. It doesn't change that your signal is coming from a direction and distance as known by the tower tracking the phone. MIMO and other beamforming techniques use this data to boost signal, but it is also collected for monitoring.