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

submitted 11 hours ago by otter@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world

137 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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[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 12 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

It drives me nuts how our economic system is making not having a cell phone increasingly difficult.

that's by design. why you do you think the US government allows corporate interests to take such a high position above American citizens? it's not just only because of corruption, it's because one hand washes the other.

The smartphone is the most amazing futuristic device I dreamed about that has evolved into a distopian nightmare.

like all technology, it can be used in ways that you cannot even imagine.

instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.

imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can't even tell what's real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.

[–] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 2 hours ago

instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.

imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can't even tell what's real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.

There's an ad blocker that does exactly this. Called Ad Nauseam. Chrome blocked it from their store super fast, then blocked it from being installed in Chrome from 3rd party sites, then blocked known versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode. I used to run it set to a low percentage - if I "clicked" every ad they'd know to throw my data out, but if I click say 3% of them...

[–] PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 4 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Run a headless browser that does random searches at random times across different social media and search engines and have it click random ads.

[–] archonet@lemy.lol 3 points 2 hours ago

you can essentially already do this with TrackMeNot and AdNauseam

[–] Glitterbomb@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

This was part of the fictional operating system in the book Little Brother. I think it inspired similar features in a particular real life Linux build too

[–] bamfic@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

ML breaks this defense

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

does it though? if everyone is sharing their advertising data under the covers no amount of ML could correct it.

think of it like a tor network for advertisement tracking.

you're going to Walmart, I'm going to Target. but according to our phones, I'm at Walmart and you're at Target. now scale it up to thousands or even millions of users sharing their advertising trackers.