Tag: smartphones

Israel is using counter-terrorism phone surveillance to track Omicron carriers

Rights groups in Israel have called on the country’s top court to repeal the recently announced measures to use the counter-terrorism phone tracking system to track carriers of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. The groups raised privacy concerns.

On Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced emergency measures including phone tracking to locate those infected by the Omicron variant, which is thought to be more contagious.

The Shin Bet counter-terrorism agency’s phone-tracking technology was to be used to enable to surveillance.

Rights groups have said that the emergency measure is a violation of the Supreme Court’s rulings on such surveillance, which has been used by the country’s domestic intelligence agency since the beginning of the pandemic last year.

“Operation of the Secret Service to trace citizens violates the basic trust between the citizen and the government,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), one of four groups who petitioned the court, said in a statement to Reuters.

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ICE Will Issue Cell Phones to Released Migrants

A law enforcement source within U.S. Customs and Border Protection says ICE Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers are ramping up their release or “Alternatives to Detention” capabilities. Cell phones with tracking apps will eventually replace ankle monitoring bracelets, according to the source.

The source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says the phones will allow for GPS tracking and check-ins using facial recognition. The available supply of ankle bracelets will be issued until depleted–at which time the phones will circulate.

The source notes the ankle monitoring efforts have proven expensive and, in many cases, the devices are discarded. The bracelets cost between $400 and $800, depending on the model. In many cases, ERO officers are tasked with tracking and recovering the discarded devices from dumpsters. The cost of a cell phone unit is currently unknown.

The 2022 Homeland Security funding bill advanced by the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday allocates $475 million to enhance ICE’s Alternatives to Detention Program. This amount is $34.5 million above the agency’s request–a sign the “catch and release” stance of the current administration will continue.

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Massachusetts Android users alarmed to wake up to COVID tracking app auto-installed

Massachusetts recently launched a contact tracing app for COVID-19, called MassNotifyApp, to track the spread of the virus in the state. But there is one big problem with the app; it is installing itself on Android devices without users’ consent, and even on devices with parental-lock.

“Thank you MA/Google for silently installing #MassNotify on my phone without consent. But I have a request: Can you also silently install an app that makes my phone explode and kill me?” someone wrote on Twitter.

The story is perhaps one of the most egregious violations of an app during the pandemic. It also contradicts what Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, said about the app; that it would be voluntary.

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Facebook Still ‘Secretly’ Tracks Your iPhone—This Is How To Stop It

So, this isn’t good. Your iPhone settings enable you to tell Facebook you don’t want your location tracked. It’s clear and non-ambiguous. Why then, if you tell Facebook “never” to access your location, is the data harvesting giant doing exactly that?

Apple’s iOS 14.5 is just a few weeks old, and the data already suggests it has delivered the expected strike against Facebook . Unsurprisingly, more than 80% of users do not opt in to being tracked. Millions of you have seen through the brazen warnings that Facebook’s free apps won’t remain free unless we surrender our right to privacy.

Facebook generates almost all its revenue from digital advertising—targeting ads by harvesting as much data from you and about you as it can. “Facebook marketing is generally dominated by iOS,” one ad industry article laments, “it’s pretty safe to assume Facebook has lost at least half their data, arguably the most valuable half.”

All of which means that Facebook will be doing ever more with the data that remains. And there’s a hidden danger in all the iOS 14.5 publicity—a false sense of security for iPhone users, thinking that the Facebook data issue is suddenly over, that everything has now changed. That would be very wrong—it really hasn’t.

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Pentagon collecting Americans’ phone data without warrants and hiding details, senator says

U.S. federal agencies including the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have been purchasing access to large databases of phone location data and hiding their motives in what Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) described as “warrantless surveillance” of Americans.

In a Thursday letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Wyden called on Austin to declassify all answers about the Department of Defense’s data collection practices. Wyden noted that of eight questions he raised with the DoD, he received unclassified answers to three questions, while the answers to the five remaining questions were offered in a classified manner.

“In February 2020, media reports revealed that U.S. government agencies are buying location data obtained from apps on Americans’ phones and are doing so without any kind of legal process, sich as a court order,” Wyden wrote. “I have spent the last year investigating the shady, unregulated data brokers that are selling this data and the government agencies that are buying it. My investigation confirmed the warrantless purchase of American’s location data by the Internal Revenue Service, Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).”

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Millions Of Public Transit “Touch ‘N Go” Smartphone Users Can Be Tracked By Law Enforcement

As more and more people use their smartphones to pay for everyday items, public transit agencies are encouraging millions of Americans to use their phones as their primary means of paying their fares.

In New York City and elsewhere, police can use ‘touch ‘n go’ or ‘touchless fares’ to track millions of public transit users’ movements.

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority’s OMNY Executive Director Al Putre said that as of December 2020 there have been over 34 million taps.

Imagine you are the Feds or the NYPD and you just found out that your agency now has access to detailed records of over 34 million transit user’s personal information. What do you think will happen?

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