Re:The forgotten war on beepers
by 2024throwaway on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @07:25PM
(#40071192)
Citations needed. These sound like wild conspiracy theories.
Neither of those links demonstrate mishandling of location data collected via cell phone. They’re just regular misuse of data that would be possible even if nobody involved was carrying a phone.
Well, I'm sure you understand that there is a broader theme here, given how central it has been to public discourse and lawmaking in the last several years.
But should that not be the case, here's data collected via cell-phone that was mishandled - https://eu.azcentral.com/story/news/local/southwest-valley/2....
But those VHF pagers transmitted all the rest of your data in the clear unprotected, it just didn't have your location or any knowledge if you received the message.
Well, you are right. But the message as well as the medium can be privacy-respecting. Even with encrypted messages, a lot can be extracted from metadata that is a part of the medium.
These days pager tech has advanced to support public-private key encryption for messages. So the messages being in plain text is less of a concern.
I'm sure you're right. They'll keep our boring, unimportant location data safe. Just like they do with our financial data, or account info, and other such important information.
Nothing bad ever happens when people's info is leaked like that anyway right?
BTW I need to confirm some data I bought - what are your CVVs and SSN again? It's fine to post it publically here, nothing bad happens and it's already been leaked 100s of times at this point.
Re:The forgotten war on beepers
by 2024throwaway on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @08:22PM
(#40071636)
Unironically this. I treat my SSN as public data. CVVs might as well be too, I can just dispute the charge.
For example, visiting a mental health clinic might mean your car insurance rates go up, or Facebook adjusts their algorithm to cause you more distress and hook you more, or your credit rating goes down. Objectively, you are worse off because you were tracked.
See a recent example with BetterHelp, where they sold their patients' history of mental health medications, suicide attempts, depression, and a few other things that were on an ingestion form to social media companies. After promising on the very form where they collected this data that they wouldn't do it. That is the reality of the situation. You turn into a product when you're tracked.