Comment on Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods

ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

FYI, the most relevant information to avoiding your phone showing up in ICE’s rented databases is how they are getting the location data:

The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.

This includes a link to a prior 404 story that may have a list of apps, but it’s paywalled and none of the archive sites seem to have it indexed: www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-s…

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