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France Developing Surveillance App Called “StopCovid” To Mitigate Virus Spread

April 9, 2020

France Developing Surveillance App Called “StopCovid” To Mitigate Virus Spread

The world is sleepwalking into a surveillance state. The march towards an Orwellian society is closer than ever, as governments have used COVID-19 as a perfect cover to implement totalitarian measures to track citizens that amount to human rights violations to “flatten the pandemic curve.”

The latest example is coming from France’s health minister Olivier Véran and digital minister Cédric O, who announced in an interview with Le Monde that the French government is developing a smartphone app that will track citizens, by warning them if they come into contact with a COVID-19 carrier.

“In the fight against Covid-19, technology can help,” O told the French newspaper. “Nothing will be decided without broad debate.”

France’s digital minister said the app project is called “StopCovid” – and will be voluntarily downloaded on smartphones — will utilize the phone’s Bluetooth capabilities to notify users if they come into proximity to a carrier. The app only works if virus carriers and others have the software operating on the phone.

“The application would simply inform you that you have been in contact in the previous days with someone who tested positive,” O said, adding that developers have been working on the app for several days.

French law currently prohibits smartphone tracking, unlike China and South Korea, that monitor their citizens to make sure COVID-19 carriers are quarantining at home.

Several lawmakers in France have told President Emmanuel Macron’s parliament that they would be opposed to geo-tracking civilians.

O told the French paper that the app uses Bluetooth and not geolocation and reaffirmed that the government would not track people.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Alarming NYT Op-Ed Reveals “Disturbing” Secretive Surveillance State Powered By Your Phone’s Location Services

December 20, 2019

Alarming NYT Op-Ed Reveals “Disturbing” Secretive Surveillance State Powered By Your Phone’s Location Services

Millions of Americans are walking around with phones that have, unknowingly, created one of the most disturbing and unintentional “surveillance states” to ever exist. 

A explosive new opinion piece in the NY Times aims to demonstrate that detailed smartphone tracking is far more ubiquitous than many think, despite the ongoing claims by companies that people’s data is “anonymous”. 

Paul Ohm, a law professor and privacy researcher at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that describing location data as anonymous is “a completely false claim that has been debunked in multiple studies.”

He added: “Really precise, longitudinal geolocation information is absolutely impossible to anonymize. D.N.A. is probably the only thing that’s harder to anonymize than precise geolocation information.”

The op-ed looked at trying to identify people in positions of power. It identified and tracked “scores” of notable people, like military officials with security clearances, as they drove home at night. They also tracked law enforcement officials and high powered lawyers. Though they didn’t name any of the people, they followed them on private jets, vacations and taking their kids to school. 

Despite some of the data pointing to “scandal and crime”, the purpose of tracking them was to document the risk of under-regulated surveillance.

One person identified was Mary Millben, a singer based in Virginia who has performed for three Presidents. When told her phone was putting her “on the map” for everyone to see, she said: “To know that you have a list of places I have been, and my phone is connected to that, that’s scary. What’s the business of a company benefiting off of knowing where I am? That seems a little dangerous to me.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China Won’t Be Taking Over

January 10, 2019

China Won’t Be Taking Over

Pablo Picasso Massacre in Korea 1951

In the New Year, after a close to the old one that was sort of terrible for our zombie markets, do prepare for a whole lot of stories about China (on top of Brexit and Yellow Vests and many more windmills fighting the Donald). And don’t count on too many positive ones that don’t originate in the country itself. Beijing will especially be full of feel-good tales about a month from now, around Chinese New Year 2019, which is February 5.

And we won’t get an easy and coherent true story, it’ll be bits and pieces stitched together. What will remain is that China did the same we did, just on steroids. It took us 100 years to build our manufacturing capacity, they did it in under 20 (and made ours obsolete). It took us 100 years to borrow enough to get a debt-to-GDP ratio of 300%, they did it in 10.

In the process they also accumulated 10 times more non-productive assets than us, idle factories, bridges to nowhere and empty cities, but they thought that would be alright, that demand would catch up with supply. And if you look at how much unproductive stuff we ourselves have gathered around us, who can blame them for thinking that? Perhaps their biggest mistake has been misreading our actual wealth situation; they didn’t see how poorly off we really are.

Xiang Songzuo, “a relatively obscure economics professor at Renmin University in Beijing”, expressed some dire warnings about the Chinese economy in a December 15 speech. He didn’t get much attention, not even in the West. Not overly surprising, since both Beijing and Wall Street have a vested interest in the continuing China growth story.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Surveillance Capitalism: Monetizing the Smartphone User

October 15, 2018

Smartphones and tablets give you access to information wherever you are. Whenever you use a device connected to the internet you are leaving a digital footprint of personal data that tech companies are likely harvesting and selling. (rawpixel/pixababy)

Surveillance Capitalism: Monetizing the Smartphone User

Commentary

This article is part of a series on corporate surveillance highlighting civil liberty, privacy, cyber security, safety, and tech-product user exploitation threats associated with connected products that are supported by the Android (Google) OS, Apple iOS, and Microsoft Windows OS.

Today, people, businesses, government officials, and law makers are unaware of the business model that supports their favorite technology such as smartphones and connected products that are supported by the Android, Apple, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

The connected-product business model comprises surveillance and data mining business practices rooted in “surveillance capitalism.” These are terms that the public is unaware of because all parties concerned are not transparent about their business practices.

Addictive, Intrusive, and Exploitative

Companies that have adopted a surveillance capitalism business model are in the business to exploit their paying customers or product users for financial gain at the expense of the user’s civil liberties, privacy, cybersecurity, and safety, whether the product user is an adult or a child.

Don’t take my word for this claim: Former Alphabet Inc. executive chairman Eric Schmidt, Facebook co-founder Sean Parker, and former Google designer Tristan Harris admit that Google and Facebook develop addictive, intrusive, and even potentially harmful technology in order to exploit the product user for financial gain.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. … They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next,” Schmidt toldThe Wall Street Journal in 2010.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

First of Its Kind University Study Proves Without a Doubt that Your Phone is Spying On You

July 8, 2018

First of Its Kind University Study Proves Without a Doubt that Your Phone is Spying On You

For years, conspiracy theories about smart phones listening to users without their permission to show them advertisements have abounded. While some researchers have shown this could happen, a first of its kind study just found something far more insidious. Academics at Northeastern University have just proven that your phone is recording your screen—as in taking video—and uploading it to third parties.

For the last year, Elleen Pan, Jingjing Ren, Martina Lindorfer, Christo Wilson, and David Choffnes ran an experiment involving more than 17,000 of the most popular Android apps using ten different phones. Their findings were alarming, to say the least.

As Gizmodo points out, during the study, the researchers started to see that screenshots and video recordings of what people were doing in apps were being sent to third-party domains. For example, when one of the phones used an app from GoPuff, a delivery start-up for people who have sudden cravings for junk food, the interaction with the app was recorded and sent to a domain affiliated with Appsee, a mobile analytics company. The video included a screen where you could enter personal information—in this case, their zip code.

GoPuff did not disclose in its terms of use that its app was recording users screens and uploading this data to a third party. What’s more, when they were contacted by the researchers GoPuff merely added a disclosure to their policy acknowledging that “ApSee” might receive users PII.

The fact that these apps can record your screen without you knowing and use this data is chilling. It illustrates how easy it would be for a malicious actor to be able to look at your private messages, personal information, passwords, photos, and videos.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Police State Surveillance: Courtesy of the Pentagon

May 23, 2018

More Police State Surveillance: Courtesy of the Pentagon

There was an article by Joseph Marks of Nextgov published on 5/16/18 that was neither picked up by the larger news networks nor kept in view for long. The article is entitled The Pentagon Has a Big Plan to Solve Identity Verification in Two Years, and here is a portion of it:

The Defense Department is funding a project that officials say could revolutionize the way companies, federal agencies and the military itself verify that people are who they say they are and it could be available in most commercial smartphones within two years. The technology, which will be embedded in smartphones’ hardware, will analyze a variety of identifiers that are unique to an individual, such as the hand pressure and wrist tension when the person holds a smartphone and the person’s peculiar gait while walking, said Steve Wallace, technical director at the Defense Information Systems Agency.  Organizations that use the tool can combine those identifiers to give the phone holder a “risk score,” Wallace said. If the risk score is low enough, the organization can presume the person is who she says she is and grant her access to sensitive files on the phone or on a connected computer or grant her access to a secure facility. If the score’s too high, she’ll be locked out.

Amazing. The Pentagon’s technical director omitted much in his quest to act as if such actions are “government streamlining” and occurring matter-of-factly, in the interests of securing information for the government and its contractors.

The problem: if it’s in the software of all the commercial smartphones (the ones bought in the stores), that biometric data will be transmitted by all the phones, not just the contractors to the federal government.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Brother = You

January 11, 2018

Big Brother = You 


Giorgione The Tempest 1508
Happy belated new year. Belatedly. Thought I’d sit out a few days, since there wasn’t much news to be expected. And it did pan out that way, other than Trump bogarting the limelight; but then, that isn’t really news either. Anything he says or does triggers the expansive anti-Donald echo chamber into a daily frenzy. And frankly, guys, it’s not just boring, but you’re also continuously providing him with free publicity. At least make him work for some of it.

Then, however, the big microprocessor (chip) security ‘flaw’ was exposed. And that’s sort of interesting, because it concerns the basic architecture of basically every microchip produced in the past 20 years, even well before smartphones. Now, the first thing you have to realize is that we’re not actually talking about a flaw here, but about a feature. We use that line a lot in a half-jokingly version, but in this case it’s very much true. As Bloomberg succinctly put it:

All modern microprocessors, including those that run smartphones, are built to essentially guess what functions they’re likely to be asked to run next. By queuing up possible executions in advance, they’re able to crunch data and run software much faster. The problem in this case is that this predictive loading of instructions allows access to data that’s normally cordoned off securely..

And:

Spectre fools the processor into running speculative operations – ones it wouldn’t normally perform – and then uses information about how long the hardware takes to retrieve the data to infer the details of that information. Meltdown exposes data directly by undermining the way information in different applications is kept separate by what’s known as a kernel, the key software at the core of every computer.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Edward Snowden’s New App Uses Your Smartphone to Physically Guard Your Laptop

December 23, 2017

Illustration: The Intercept

EDWARD SNOWDEN’S NEW APP USES YOUR SMARTPHONE TO PHYSICALLY GUARD YOUR LAPTOP

LIKE MANY OTHER journalists, activists, and software developers I know, I carry my laptop everywhere while I’m traveling. It contains sensitive information; messaging app conversations, email, password databases, encryption keys, unreleased work, web browsers  logged into various accounts, and so on. My disk is encrypted, but all it takes to bypass this protection is for an attacker — a malicious hotel housekeeper, or “evil maid,” for example — to spend a few minutes physically tampering with it without my knowledge. If I come back and continue to use my compromised computer, the attacker could gain access to everything.

Edward Snowden and his friends have a solution. The NSA whistleblower and a team of collaborators have been working on a new open source Android app called Haven that you install on a spare smartphone, turning the device into a sort of sentry to watch over your laptop. Haven uses the smartphone’s many sensors — microphone, motion detector, light detector, and cameras — to monitor the room for changes, and it logs everything it notices. The first public beta version of Haven has officially been released; it’s available in the Play Store and on F-Droid, an open source app store for Android.

Snowden is helping to develop the software through a project he leads at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which receives funding from The Intercept’s parent company. I sit on the FPF board with Snowden, am an FPF founder, and lent some help developing the app, including through nine months of testing. With that noted, I’ll be forthright about the product’s flaws below, and have solicited input for this article from people not involved in the project.

Also collaborating on Haven is the Guardian Project, a global collective of mobile security app developers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is Facebook Using Your Phone’s Camera And Microphone To Spy On You? 

December 22, 2017

Is Facebook Using Your Phone’s Camera And Microphone To Spy On You? 

Do you ever feel like you’re being watched when there’s nobody else around?

Decades ago, if the answer to that question was ‘yes’, doctors might’ve advised you to see what they called a headshrinker. But technological progress has a funny way of turning situations on their head. For example, at the turn of the 20th century, everybody had horses – but only the wealthy had cars.

Today, everybody has a car: but only rich people have horses.

The same principle applies to surveillance: If you don’t believe you’re being spied on constantly, then you should probably have your head examined.

As advertisers hone increasingly sophisticated microtargeting techniques, ordinary social media users are reporting disturbing coincidences like the one Jen Lewis recounted to the Daily Mail.

While out shopping, Lewis and a friend discussed purchasing a film camera. Not 20 minutes later, Lewis’s friend checked Facebook on her phone and discovered, to her alarm, a targeted advertisement for the very same camera she had just considered purchasing.

Then, less than 20 minutes later, an advert popped up on Lois’s phone, for the exact same product. Same colour, same model, same everything.

‘They’re listening, they’re watching,’ she said.

‘Oh don’t be daft,’ I replied. ‘Who’s listening? Who’d want to listen to us?’

‘I’m serious,’ said Lois. ‘This keeps happening. This is no coincidence. Someone is listening to our conversations. Advertisers. They’re listening via our phones’ microphones.’

At first, Lewis didn’t understand what her friend was getting at. But it quickly dawned on her: Was Facebook recording their conversation and converting its content into fodder for targeted advertisements – all in real time?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

New Device Allows Cops to Download All of Your Smartphone Activity in Seconds

June 28, 2017

New Device Allows Cops to Download All of Your Smartphone Activity in Seconds

(ANTIMEDIA) New York  — “Any person who operates a motor vehicle in the state shall be deemed to have given consent to field testing of his or her mobile telephone and/or personal electronic device for the purpose of determining the use thereof while operating a motor vehicle, provided that such testing is conducted by or at the direction of a police officer.”

That’s language from the text of a bill currently working its way through the New York state legislature. The legislation would allow cops to search through drivers’ cell phones following traffic incidents — even minor fender-benders — to determine if the person was using their phone while behind the wheel.

Most states have laws banning the use of mobile devices while driving, though such laws are rarely enforced. This is largely because it’s nearly impossible to catch someone in the act. What person would admit to an officer that they broke the law, the argument goes, particularly when it’s after the fact? After all, cops don’t show up until after the accident occurs.

Now, technology exists that would give police the power to plug drivers’ phones into tablet-like devices — being called “textalyzers” in the media — that tell officers exactly what they were doing on their phone and exactly when they were doing it. And if the readout shows a driver was texting while driving, for instance, the legal system will have an additional way to fine them.

“Recording your every click, tap or swipe, it would even know what apps you were using. Police officers could download the data, right on the spot,” Jeff Rossen of NBC News said in a video report on the technology.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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