News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by tabs_masterrace on Thursday November 12, 2020 @07:28AM (#25069080)
The number of government requests for user information is actually scary:

https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview

So Google handed over info on 175k accounts in the last half of 2019 alone? It seems it's becoming common practice to routinely pull citizens data, without much of a warrant and without the target's knowledge. There used to be a thing called secrecy of correspondence, preventing governments from reading your letters. Now whenever your name lands on some clerk's desk, and he feels you might be hiding something, he just requests all your emails.

This is all necessary because of "terrorist & child porn", but in reality we got mass surveillance. Next up gonna be social scores, it's like total authoritarianism in the making.

Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by absolutelyrad on Thursday November 12, 2020 @08:26AM (#25069584)
> https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview

WTF? This makes me extremely uncomfortable for some reason. There was some hope in mind that Snowden was exaggerating but this is just insane.

It feels like liberty has failed. There's no other option but to give in and accept.

I submit to the overlords, but I'm not happy about this.

Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by hoot on Thursday November 12, 2020 @09:25AM (#25070169)
Liberty is not free. If you value it, then you're going to have to fight for it. Submission now leads to your descendants living in an oppressive dystopia.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by javert on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:30AM (#25070885)
It leads to us living in an oppressive dystopia.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by mancerayder on Thursday November 12, 2020 @01:16PM (#25072827)
The pressure should be on our governments to regulate the powerful (Google). Meanwhile we're happily electing people who have direct ties to Silicon Valley big tech and calling ourselves Resistance. It cuts both ways!

Without government help, the only way to fight the oppressive dystopia you talked about is by becoming Richard Stallman. And I value not living in a university office and having to use Lynx and pine.

Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by fsflover on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:19AM (#25070762)
> There's no other option but to give in and accept.

Yes, there are options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PinePhone

Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by hutzlibu on Thursday November 12, 2020 @08:53AM (#25069807)
Why do you give up, because other people know more about you, than you thought?

Maybe giving up on the "nobody must ever know", but maybe not in general?

There are still quite some steps from here to 1984, despite people dramatizing.

Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by badsectoracula on Thursday November 12, 2020 @11:27AM (#25071499)
Maybe but the direction is towards 1984 not away from it.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by hutzlibu on Thursday November 12, 2020 @12:35PM (#25072259)
Yup. But the more people believe we are already there and give up, the faster we accelerate.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by texasbigdata on Thursday November 12, 2020 @09:24AM (#25070157)
This is bad math but there’s 220 million “elligible” Americans (not too young, not too old); if we assume 85% cellphone/ tech penetration that represents 0.1% of all Americans a year on napkin bar math.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by gundmc on Thursday November 12, 2020 @03:19PM (#25074385)
"Without much of a warrant" doesn't make sense as a phrase. Either you have a warrant or you don't. You can take issue with the grounds for a warrant or the breadth, but that's up to a judge to determine. There's no sliding scale. It's binary - there is or is or not a warrant.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by snarf21 on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:15AM (#25070719)
I agree this is troubling but no one seems to care that the carriers know where you are 24/7 even when you aren't using your phone.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by jannes on Thursday November 12, 2020 @11:02AM (#25071227)
Not only that, carrier triangulation is getting much more precise with 5G because of the smaller cell sizes.

So far they are using it for beamforming, but I think location tracking is also one of the advertised use cases.

Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by izacus on Thursday November 12, 2020 @07:31AM (#25069113)
Not only that, but here in Europe we've gotten laws lately where the ISPs and companies like Google are forced to retain data for just such requests. (This data retention is, of course, excluded from GDPR as well.)
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by aboringusername on Thursday November 12, 2020 @07:56AM (#25069323)
I don't actually consider that a problem, in fact, it's a feature and not a bug.

You should assume your every interaction within the world is logged, your every tap, click, spoken and unspoken words. And act in accordance, there can a camera watching you, or a mic picking up your bigoted rant.

You can (I love miley cyrus) add fake data to your posts, misdirect AI tools, and throw them off the scent if you wish. You give them the information you want to (you should probably use your own router, DNS, VPN, other tools). Dinosaurs are awesome.

They can only store the data you're generating. Don't generate it? No data to access.

I live in Mexico and love Donald Trump.

Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by srtjstjsj on Thursday November 12, 2020 @08:24AM (#25069554)
> add fake data to your posts, misdirect AI tools

This wastes your time and provides no value. Your fake data is insignificant noise compared to your real data signal.

Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by jmnicolas on Thursday November 12, 2020 @03:45PM (#25074747)
Yes it's all about the metadata. And let's not forget:

> We Kill People Based On Metadata (Michael Hayden former NSA boss)

Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by GordonS on Thursday November 12, 2020 @02:03PM (#25073510)
Wow, holy hell, that's orders of magnitude higher than I would have guessed even pessimistically!
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by Aunche on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:38AM (#25070969)
You're assuming that they're citizen accounts rather than fake accounts from pedophiles, spammers, and scammers.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by _jal on Thursday November 12, 2020 @11:04AM (#25071243)
1) Please define 'fake account'. Does the fact that I have more than one Google account mean that some of them are 'fake'? What if I lie about or omit my government name?

2) When did people start losing their citizenship by breaking the law?

Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by Aunche on Thursday November 12, 2020 @11:28AM (#25071510)
By fake I mean a throwaway account made for the sole purpose of criminal activity. A thousand accounts created by a single scammer do not deserve the same privacy as your personal email account.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by gberger on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:48AM (#25071079)
Pedophiles, spammers, and scammers are still citizens.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by Aunche on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:55AM (#25071146)
I mean it's possible that they're alt account created on a whim rather than ones that represent actual people. Law enforcement could have requested information from about a few people who each created thousands of accounts, for example.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by gberger on Thursday November 12, 2020 @04:08PM (#25075073)
What's the criteria for an account being labeled as an alt acocunt or not? It's still created/owned by a citizen.
Re:Google knows where we are, and so do advertisers by goodluckchuck on Thursday November 12, 2020 @10:55AM (#25071141)
You're not exactly using FirstNameLastName as your account either.