Tag: smartphones

Feds May Need Warrants To Search Cell Phones at the Border After All

The role of smart phones as snitches is well-established, with people paying for their handy communications capabilities while the treacherous devices track us and reveal details of our lives. Even as the government spoofs cellphone towers to locate phone users, or purchases commercial data about our movements, border agents also insist they can, at will, search the phones of Americans returning home. But last month a federal judge ruled that a free pass to probe electronic devices is too broad, and that Americans enjoy some protections at the border of the sort they have elsewhere.

In this latest case, United States v. Smith, Jatiek Smith, the subject of a federal investigation, was stopped at the airport in Newark on his return from Jamaica. As detailed by U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff, federal agents “forced him to turn over his cellphone and its password. They reviewed the phone manually and created and saved an electronic copy of it as it existed as of that date and time – all without a search warrant.”

Wait. No warrant? Unfortunately, yes.

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Consumer Group Warns Smartphone Facial Recognition Apps Are Vulnerable to Spoofing

Smartphone face biometrics from many leading brands are vulnerable to spoof attacks with 2D photographs, according to a new report from UK-based consumer testing and review group Which?, according to Yahoo Finance UK.

The group says the vulnerability is “unacceptable,” and has “worrying implications” for user’s security.

On-device biometrics are used for device unlocking and local authentication, while KYC processes for customer onboarding and strong remote identity verification is typically carried out with server-side biometrics and other signals, with a layer of liveness or presentation attack detection.

The phones tested include Honor, Motorola, Nokia, Oppo, Samsung, Vivo and Xiaomi handsets. Apple’s 3D FaceID biometrics were not fooled by the photos. The devices tested range in price from £89.99 to nearly £1,000 (approximately US$112 to $1,244), but the majority of phones that failed the test are lower-cost or mid-range models.

Out of 48 new smartphone models tested, 60 percent were not vulnerable to spoofing with a photograph.

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8 ways your phone is tracking you that you can stop now

You understand that your phone knows where you’re located.

This is how GPS works, how Find My Friends sees your location, and why you get local ads on Facebook and Google.

Like other data on your phone, that location data is a hot commodity for internet marketers in today’s digital economy.

Targeted advertising is one of the biggest enterprises on the web.

Companies are eager to serve you ads for products you’re likely to buy, and that data helps them hit their mark.

Some companies have even made this their primary business model. Tap or click here to see one shocking way Facebook tracks your data.

Thankfully, you don’t have to stand for this kind of data collection if you’re uncomfortable with it.

These tactics are legal because the companies behind them give you a choice to opt in or out, but not everyone knows how to change the settings.

We’ll show you how to stop your phone from tracking you.

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Massachusetts Department of Public Health SECRETELY Colluded With Google To Auto-Install Contact-Tracing SPYWARE On Your Phone

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health is facing a class action lawsuit after colluding with Google to repeatedly auto-install contact-tracing spyware on the smartphones of over a million Massachusetts residents without their permission or consent.

According to a class action lawsuit filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan nonprofit civil rights organization, the Department of Public Health rolled out the contact tracing app it worked with Google to create in April 2021.

“The App causes an Android mobile device to constantly connect and exchange information with other nearby devices via Bluetooth and creates a record of such other connections. If a user opts in and reports being infected with COVID-19, an exposure notification is sent to other individuals on the infected user’s connection record,” the NCLA explains in the complaint, Wright v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

Initially, the app which obtains users private locations and health information was voluntarily installed.

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Saudis Use Orwellian App to Identify Dissidents, Imprisoning Some for Decades

Saudi Arabians are using a mobile app sold by both Apple and Google to snitch on their fellow citizens for dissenting against government authorities. As a result, activists and others are going to prison for more than 30 years in some cases, Business Insider reported on Friday.

On August 16, Saudi national Salma el-Shabab, a PhD student at Leeds University, was sentenced to 34 years in prison for tweets “in support of activists and members of the kingdom’s political opposition in exile,” the report said. Though the posts were made while she was in the UK, el-Shabab was nonetheless reported through the “Kollona Amn” app and immediately arrested upon returning home. 

“Every day we wake up to hear news, somebody has been arrested, or somebody has been taken,” Real, a Saudi women’s-rights activist using an alias, told Insider.

Kollona Amn – which roughly translates to “We Are All Security” in Arabic – was launched by the Saudi Interior Ministry in 2017, but the last few years have seen a “dramatic” surge in court cases referencing the app, according to legal-rights activists.

The app “encourages everyday citizens to play the role of police and become active participants in their own repression. Putting the state’s eyes everywhere also creates a pervasive sense of uncertainty – there is always a potential informant in the room or following your social media accounts,” said Noura Aljizawi, a researcher at Citizen Lab, which focuses on threats to free speech online.

The Orwellian nature of the app is such that users often report on people “defensively,” fearing they could face punishment themselves for merely overhearing speech deemed offensive to the regime. In some cases, the app has also been used for “blackmail” and to “settle scores,” Insider noted.

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Feds Accessing Location Data from Millions of People Through Private Brokers

Big Brother is tracking your location with the help of private data brokers.

According to a recent report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), data brokers harvest location data from mobile apps and then sell it to government agencies including state and local law enforcement, ICE, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

Many of the apps on a mobile device track and record location data. These include navigation apps, social media apps, and weather apps, among many others. According to EFF, once a user gives an app permission to access location data, it typically has “free rein” to share it with just about anybody. Government agencies take advantage of these loose standards to purchase troves of location data relating to millions of individuals from data brokers.

“Once in government hands, the data is used by the military to spy on people overseas, by ICE to monitor people in and around the U.S., and by criminal investigators like the FBI and Secret Service.”

There is a tangled web of companies buying and selling data in this multi-billion-dollar industry. According to the EFF report, it’s virtually impossible to determine which apps share data. But apparently, a lot of them do. Data broker Venntel, a subsidiary of Gravy Analytics, claims to collect location data from over 80,000 apps.

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The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Admit They Are Spying on Canadians by Turning on Their Cell Phone Cameras and Mics

Despite having the technology for years, this is the first time the Royal Canadian Mounted Police admitted that they are spying on their citizens by logging into their phone cameras and phones. 

After watching the trucker protests in Canada last year, it comes as no surprise that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are spying on Canadians.

The RCMP admitted this for the first time:

This is the first time RCMP has even acknowledged that it has this ability, which uses malware to intrude on phones and devices, despite having had the technology for years…

…The RCMP says those tools were only used in serious cases when other, unintrusive measures were not successful.

We saw this past winter what the RCMP did to the truckers who protested the insane mandates coming down from PM Trudeau and his government.

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How the Federal Government Buys Our Cell Phone Location Data

Over the past few years, data brokers and federal military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies have formed a vast, secretive partnership to surveil the movements of millions of people. Many of the mobile apps on our cell phones track our movements with great precision and frequency. Data brokers harvest our location data from the app developers, and then sell it to these agencies. Once in government hands, the data is used by the military to spy on people overseas, by ICE to monitor people in and around the U.S., and by criminal investigators like the FBI and Secret Service. This post will draw on recent research and reporting to explain how this surveillance partnership works, why is it alarming, and what can we do about it.

Where does the data come from?

Weather apps, navigation apps, coupon apps, and “family safety” apps often request location access in order to enable key features. But once an app has location access, it typically has free rein to share that access with just about anyone.

That’s where the location data broker industry comes in. Data brokers entice app developers with cash-for-data deals, often paying per user for direct access to their device. Developers can add bits of code called “software development kits,” or SDKs, from location brokers into their apps. Once installed, a broker’s SDK is able to gather data whenever the app itself has access to it: sometimes, that means access to location data whenever the app is open. In other cases, it means “background” access to data whenever the phone is on, even if the app is closed.

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Your iPhone Is Vulnerable to Hacking Even When Turned Off

A new report has revealed that iPhones are vulnerable to malware attacks even when they’re turned off.

Wired reports that according to a recent study from researchers at Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt, iPhone devices are still vulnerable to malware attacks even when powered off. When turning an iPhone off, chips inside the device still run in a low-power state making it possible to locate the lost or stolen device using the Find My app.

Now, researchers have developed a method to run malware on iPhones even when the devices appear to be powered off. The Bluetooth chip in all iPhones has no way to digitally sign or encrypt the firmware it runs, researchers have now developed a method to exploit the lack of security on the chip and run malicious firmware allowing the researchers to track the iPhone’s location or run new features.

In a recently published paper, the researchers studied the risk posed by chips running in a low-power mode that allows chips responsible for NFC, ultra-wideband, and Bluetooth to run in a more that can remain active for 24 hours after a device is turned off.

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