US authorities can see more than ever, with Big Tech as their eyes
54 comments
·February 28, 2025Syonyk
zeta0134
For a couple of years now I've been using [my area code] - 555 - [a unique 4-digit pin] for dealing with otherwise "walk-in" business that look at you like you have three heads if you decline to say a phone number out loud. In the US at least, the 555 block is defacto "fictional" and typically isn't assigned out, so it lets me create a valid looking number that won't accidentally ring some random real person if they try to call it.
forgetfreeman
Minor quibble, 555 isn't fictional, it's typically reserved for teleco internal use, or at least that was the case 25 years ago, who knows what the deal is now. Used to be you could wardial 555-xxxx and end up with all kinds of weird AT&T field installations, back office numbers, switch remote command and control modem numbers, etc.
seveneves7s
Just don't bring your phone with you. With low power states and opaque software and hardware, you really can't risk it. You can never be sure it's truly off, unless it's in a Faraday bag. But is it worth it?
smgit
Its like expecting farm animals to keep track of how the farm works, as the farm gets more and more sophisticated in animal domestication and exploitation. The individual action argument was weak 10 years ago and its worthless today.
The is a Systemic problem. Doesn't matter what the individuals do.
ty6853
The trouble is people thinking it can be fixed with the system. I've been to a few dictatorships, none of them had the slightest clue what I was doing because the government was too poor and distracted with stuff like militias at their door to take much interest in what I was doing.
Safety comes from dysfunctional governance. Surveillance is a property of functional governance. Embrace disfunction.
AtlasBarfed
The basic rule of thumb is, if a company knows something about you, then the government does too.
Which means they know everything you have posted, everywhere you've gone, everywhere you've worked, what you think politically, and almost certainly have AI profilers trying to "precog" you.
To say nothing of camera surveillance, gait analysis, facial recognition, license plate tracking, cell phone signal interceptors.
All it takes is for one authoritarian to walk in and turn the key and POOF we have perfect.
Are we in danger of that? Oh right, no politics on HN. Don't worry, be happy folks.
seveneves7s
No politics on HN, unless they're the right flavor.
monero-xmr
It is impossible to avoid, and if you try to avoid it, you stick out. The correct maneuver is to appear normal, but selectively shutdown the system. Turn your phone on airplane and pay with cash with the moment is right. We live in a panopticon afterall.
In a country with the rule of law like the USA, the government can know you committed a crime, you know you committed a crime, society may suspect you of committing a crime, but criminal law requires a jury to convict beyond reasonable doubt. With a good lawyer this is a very tough bar, it's how organized crime gets away with so much (and despite the mafia being out of the news, they operate extremely well to this day).
So selectively you choose when to be anonymous. You pick your battles.
As a practical matter that may help the average HN normie, if you have a family you likely have life insurance. Never, ever, buy alcohol, marijuana, or cigarette / vapes / nicotine products with a credit card. Always pay cash. If you die the insurance company will go through everything to try and deny.
In the reverse case, the modern day can help you. If you drive, get a dashcam. You don't have to reveal video if you are at fault. But if not at fault, the video is gold. Put cameras around your house.
If you have rental property attached to your primary domicile, never have the internet under your own primary internet, lest you give reason for a wayward tenant to cause a search of your own home.
You aren't protecting yourself for the 99.99% time, you are prepared for the 0.01% case
fhchl
Have been using proto mail for a few years now and highly recommend it. You will ever have a cute @pm.me address!
TriangleEdge
Wait until that author learns about Edward Snowden or advertisement agencies.
I used to play with Twitters firehose back in the day and there's quite a lot of personal data you derive from private accounts. We could tell the city someone likely lived if they followed a certain amount of people from a specific city, etc. Could also guess their gender with 95% accuracy with just using n-grams from their tweets. We'd test our algorithms with public accounts.
I think there's too much power and money in personal information for it to stop.
tptacek
What these analyses always miss is that providers on foreign soil have even less protection against the US IC: breaking into foreign providers is literally NSA's chartered mission. That's not to say you should deliberately use US providers! Unless, that is, abuse of legal process in the US motivates your decisionmaking, in which case: an abused legal process beats no process requirements at all.
idrathernot
It’s not even that they have to “break in.” The government allows big tech companies to basically do whatever they want as long as big tech provides the government with an easy way to move forward with the parallel construction needed to bring case against literally anyone should officials be motivated to see that person imprisoned. Everything you’ve ever done can and will be used against you to maximum effect.
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AtlasBarfed
It's the NSA's job to do that domestically, it's just supposed to be firewalled by some hidden kangaroo court that absolutely doesn't do its job: FBI agents have been busted stalking women/exs several times.
Has been since 9/11. Remember, there's the omnipresent neverending war on terror.
tptacek
I mean, sure, stipulate that. But there isn't even a kangaroo court for a service hosted in Europe.
idrathernot
Europe has plenty of “Kangaroo courts” of their own and partnerships like five eyes encourages authorities to share information. The UK’s NSA equivalent doesn’t need to worry about infringing on an American’s 4th amendment right and technically (if you don’t think about it) the NSA has plausible deniability if the UK shares this information. And vise versa with UK citizens or any western government.
xyzal
Where was that nightmare GDPR letter template again?
panny
>giants like Meta, Google, and Apple must collect as much of your personal data as possible
Stopped reading there. If someone tries to sell a lie like that in their first five sentences, I can't trust anything they say.
gamgam69
Why is it a lie? Oh, do you work for one of them?
bamboozled
Is it a lie?
haswell
Meta and Google must collect your data.
Apple does collect some of your data, but their business doesn't depend on it, and I have some degree of control over how much I participate.
I think it's a category error to include all three in the same sentence, but I don't think the author is lying. I do agree somewhat with the sentiment that such a lack of distinction calls the content into question, or at least the author's framing of it.
forgetfreeman
Disagree. All three companies exist in the set of massively international megacorps who as a matter of routine daily business collect and distribute personal information of the individuals who use their service. Being precious about what percentage of their yearly revenue is generated by this activity seems weird.
XorNot
Google have stopped recording location history (opt-in) server side at all.
billy99k
The government colluded with Facebook and Twitter during the Biden administration to censor and control Americans.
When liberals are in charge and it's hidden from the public, we don't see any of these articles and nobody seemed to even care.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
I do care about privacy but only one party wants me dead for being transgender
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anonym29
They don't want you dead, they're all just pretending to as part of a ruse to keep everyone else from discovering that they want you in a different way.
seveneves7s
News to all those dead trans people then.
panny
Scott Pressler, a gay man, was almost single handedly responsible for swinging Pennsylvania, and therefore the 2024 election. He motivated 200,000 Amish to get out and vote after the FDA overeach tried to shut them down. MAGA loves their LGBT.
gamgam69
"My one counterexample disproves the mountain of evidence. I am very smart."
isaacremuant
That propaganda line is so old and stale. Specially from people who literally wanted anyone who dissented with their anti constitutional policies during COVID dead/in camps/removed from society.
But hey, you keep pushing that lie, I'm sure it will work next time you tell people to "ignore the genocide being commited because it will be worse if the the other team is the one doing it".
SlightlyLeftPad
Not quite, I still cared and I’ve personally written to congress about it. Surprisingly, I got a response. Unsurprisingly, the response I got was basically a diplomatic “We know better than you do, we don’t care what you think, we’re going to do it anyway”
gamgam69
I mean this nicely: it isn't 1995 anymore. Your electeds give zero shits about you, and they haven't for a long time.
SlightlyLeftPad
I didn’t want to believe that at first but that became crystal clear after the responses I got.
anonym29
Many (but not all, it's worth noting) people who work for the government live in an apartheid society inside their own heads, where they and everyone else who works for government is the superior tier of their imaginary hierarchy, and everyone else is thought of as "lesser than", with fewer rights, a different (more strict) set of rules, on the inferior tier of their imaginary hierarchy.
Next time you're observing this, try to imagine the outrage if the government official were a white South African government official talking to a black South African citizen. There's the same level of condescending animosity and supremacist ideology at play, just along a completely different axis - employer rather than skin color.
gamgam69
I'm pretty sure this is just inside YOUR own head.
SlightlyLeftPad
Yeah I do imagine that on a regular basis yet, something about my comment appears to be unpopular since I’m being downvoted. I usually don’t mind but this one bothers me a little bit since writing to congress is just about the only thing an average American can do to influence the legislation. Actively participating in democracy is not cool these days.
surfpel
Leave please, rational statements on politics are not allowed here. You are only allowed to base your opinions on the contradictory, irrational rhetoric of the two dominant right-wing neoliberal political parties. You are not allowed to point out that both political parties encroach on American liberties and fundamentally work together to get it done. Your understanding of history, economics, and society must be based entirely off of vibes. "Left" and "Right" as terms must be completely devoid of real substance and refer primarily to a color and which insufferable attitude you hold.
harimau777
That's because the left doesn't use the same rhetoric as the right does in America.
Although they believe that capitalism is misguided and harmful, they don't treat it as fundamentally unAmerican in the way that the right does with socialism. E.g. You don't hear the left trying to start moral panics around "they are teaching kids CAPITALISM in school!!!"
The left hasn't performed ideological purges of government in the way that the right currently is. Again, much of the issue is that the right treats left wing belief not as something that they disagree with but as something to be purged from society.
The left hasn't written executive orders declaring that people they don't like don't exist the way that the right has with trans people. Again, there's the urge to attempt to eliminate the ability for groups they dislike to exist in society.
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notber293
Twitter published a big of gov interference. I distinctly remember most reactions were just nothing-burger. Just partisan politics.
majormajor
HN has been full of privacy and critical-of-government-surveillance articles regardless of the presidency for over a decade.
Most obviously, who was President when Snowden leaked things?
Methinks you are overly sensitive on behalf of your chosen boss.
OR you are trying to deflect from the surveillance by making it a partisan thing.
bilbo0s
The government colluded with Facebook and Twitter during the Biden administration
There's people that think this only happened during the Biden Administration?
Not Obama? Not Trump? Not Bush? Just Biden?
The gullibility of Americans in aggregate is stunning at times. If you're one of those still out preaching the quasi-religions of "left" or "right", you're honestly a large part of the problem at this point. And you're probably too submerged in the holy waters of your quasi-religion's divine scriptures to even begin to understand why.
anonym29
I'd hazard a guess that the person you're responding to is not so naïve that they believe this was unique to the Biden administration, but rather, is frustrated at what they feel is this kind of government tyranny often only being discussed through a partisan, one-sided lens that they might characterize as emphasizing this kind of stuff when conservative administrations do it but downplaying when progressive administrations do it.
I'm not necessarily supporting or defending that position, but we should at least strive to argue against the steelman version of our opponent's position, rather than the strawman position, no?
bilbo0s
Steelman is "they meant what they said."
ie - no reinterpretation at all.
But even taking your reinterpretation at face value, it still couches the issue in terms of the "left" and "right" quasi-religions, no?
watwut
> one-sided lens that they might characterize as emphasizing this kind of stuff when conservative administrations do it but downplaying when progressive administrations do it.
Conservative administrations are worst tho. That is the objective reality. And as of now, there is not left wing analogy to what conservatives are doing. Democrats are not perfect, but common, the aggression and fanatization of the actual party is not even close. It is moderate center on the "left side" vs the thing we see on the right.
One sided lens are the ones that achieve "equality" by euphemism away conservative goals and behaviors while trying to paint their opposition in worst possible light. Obama wore tan suit which totally breaks respectability of the presidency and therefore, he is equal to Trump who talks about "grabbing women by the <body part>" kind of false equality.
The book from a year or two ago, "Means of Control," by Tau, goes into some pretty good detail on the data collection and sales from just the adtech firms - where the entire ecosystem seems to be, "You can't use our data for anything but advertising... wink wink", and everyone knows exactly who is bidding on ads, and never winning any, just to slurp up location data and sell it. Or the "companies that don't sell the government." Also, they don't vet any clients beyond "The credit card is good."
> And because giants like Meta, Google, and Apple must collect as much of your personal data as possible, there’s little they can do to protect your privacy.
I quite disagree with the "must" there. They choose to collect as much data as possible, because that's their business model.
And the good news is, it's fairly easy to opt out of quite a lot of that.
Turn location services off, turn your phone off when moving about, and pay cash without "personal tracking cards" associated with you. Just about everywhere has [local area code] 867-5309 registered, if you care.