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Ads in Popular Apps Give Police a Powerful Tool to Spy on Users (www.bloomberg.com)
submitted 21 hours ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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Penlink’s Webloc is sold to police in the US, UK and worldwide. It uses technology found in weather, gaming, email and religious apps to locate people using their cellphones.

In presentations prepared last year for international law enforcement agencies, representatives of US digital intelligence company Penlink showed off their flagship technology, Webloc. They demonstrated the system tracking people as they walked down Fifth Avenue in New York City, visited the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, and moved close to the UK Parliament in central London.

The presentations said that Webloc, originally developed by an Israeli startup, Cobwebs, can track hundreds of millions of mobile phones across the world. For law enforcement, that’s a powerful capability — made more so by the fact that in the US it can be used without the need for any kind of search warrant or judicial authorization.

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[–] 35 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

Advertising is the most prolific form of environmental pollution wrought by commerce.

It needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking, and every instance of it must be exhaustively scrutinised and required to be justified.

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    • [–] 28 points 19 hours ago

    Full blown fascism is upon us. They're doing this in case people get ideas about uprising.

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    [–] 17 points 20 hours ago (3 children)
    • Pihole, or adguard home (or whatever it is called), comes in for a somewhat answer!
    • Wireguard into your LAN for when you are out and about, comes in for a somewhat answer!
    • a openWRT firewall, that you can keep up to date rather than your ISPs, comes in for a somewhat answer!
    • Self host as much as you can, comes in for a somewhat answer!
    • FOSS as much as you can, comes in for a somewhat answer!

    I have done a lot of this I am still working on the FOSS stage, I am sure there are other things I am missing but ad blocking at the DNS level is the first good step.

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  • [–] [S] 13 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

    This is about mobile apps. Stuff for your home router isn't really relevant here. And anyone that vigilant about their home router won't be installing those crapware apps in the first place. But, we all know people who do have those apps.

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  • [–] 4 points 15 hours ago (1 child)

    I think you missed the portion about wire guarding into your home internet. Set up a rule so that whenever off home WiFi activate wireguard and you have your pihole block list wherever you go. Although you may have a decrease in speeds.

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    • [–] 4 points 8 hours ago

    Disable JavaScript.

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    [–] 3 points 19 hours ago

    I already knew that many apps and email services use trackers to collect information. That’s why, whenever I can, I read the privacy policy to understand what data is being collected and how it may be used. Even so, it isn’t always easy to know how secure an app really is.

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    [+] [S] 1 point 21 hours ago
    [deleted]
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    [–] 1 point 19 hours ago

    *crapps, best avoided for the most part.

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    1 comment in c/privacy@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 7 points 19 hours ago

    What are these "ads" you speak of?

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