It Takes Just $1,000 to Track Someone's Location With Mobile Ads

Ad Tech Says It’s Not In The Surveillance Business. Now Is The Time To Prove It | AdExchanger

ICE wants to know how ad tech and location data could aid investigations. The question is: Will ad tech finally draw a line – or cross one?

Why you should bet big on privacy | TechCrunch

Ever felt like you were being watched online? You know, like when you read something about New York, and the next site you visit shows you ads for New York hotels? As it turns out, on my computer, there were more than 130 companies tracking my every move. These companies are basically engaging in mass surveillance.

Everyone knows your location

How I tracked myself down using leaked location data in the in-app ads, and what I found along the way.

This Tool Unmasks the Shadowy World of Ads that Track Your Location

It's usually very difficult to investigate the advertising industry. A new tool called DecryptAds aims to make it much easier with a massive dataset anyone can query.

Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility

We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the 1/10 power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.

NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

Snowden documents show agency is collecting billions of records on whereabouts of mobile devices

‘Invasive’ AI-led mass surveillance in Africa violating freedoms, warn experts

Countries across the continent have spent more than $2bn on Chinese tracking technology that is not ‘necessary or proportionate’, new report finds

A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers (Published 2019)

The authorities can scan your phones, track your face and find out when you leave your home. One of the world’s biggest spying networks is aimed at regular people, and nobody can stop it.

Baffle Web Trackers By Obfuscating Your Online Activities

Software that spits out misinformation about what you're actually doing on the web is a fascinating development in our relationship to online surveillance.

UK spies using social media data for mass surveillance | TechCrunch

Privacy rights group Privacy International says it has obtained evidence for the first time that UK spy agencies are collecting social media information on potentially millions of people.

Exposing AdFection: How Discover-Tech Turned Targeted Ads Into a Pipeline for Zero-Click Mercenary Spyware - The Citizen Lab

This is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads. We call the technique AdFection, and show how it was used to infect devices at Al Jazeera with Candiru’s spyware. We also uncover Discover-Tech, and show how the company helps mercenary surveillance vendors track and hack devices around the world.

bsky.app | WhoTracks.Me

Explore the tracking landscape of bsky.app on WhoTracks.Me, revealing the most common trackers like Sentry and their impact on privacy

Flightradar24 — how does it work?

I’m going to hazard a guess and say that everyone whose friends or family have ever flown on a plane, have used Flightradar24 — a free and convenient service for tracking flights in real time. But, if...

How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance | Hacker News

It took basically until now for the bloom to come off the rose. Think about that. For 20 years Google has been supposedly hiring the smartest guys in the room and all it took was free food, some ball pits and slides, contributing some tech to open source, and working on a handful of "moonshots" that haven't gone anywhere to keep the sheen of innovation going. And it worked. For 20 years.