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Cellphones Privacy

Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones At Abortion Clinics (404media.co) 235

Slashdot reader samleecole writes: Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the world. Abortion clinics, places of worship, and individual people can all be monitored without a warrant.

An investigation into tracking tool Locate X shows in the starkest terms yet how it and others — based on smartphone location data sold to various U.S. government law enforcement agencies, including state entities — could be used to monitor abortion clinic patients. This comes as more states contemplate stricter or outright bans on abortion...

Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones At Abortion Clinics

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  • by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Saturday October 26, 2024 @02:41PM (#64895995) Homepage

    If you are worried about being tracked, DO NOT BRING YOUR CELLPHONE.

    We cannot stop them from tracking us as we go about our daily lives, but we can choose to not carry our tracking devices when we want to avoid being tracked.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      That's why I always take my landline when on abortion excursions. I can never be tracked that way. Fools!

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday October 26, 2024 @02:52PM (#64896009)
      or the facial recognition. Or the heavily militarized police?

      This is one tier to a multi-prong strategy. You can't solve this with individual actions. It requires... collective action (duh duh duuuuuuun!).

      You're up against large, well funded systems. Systemic problems cannot be solved with individual action. We're not teenagers anymore, we're adults. It's time to act like it.
      • Remove your license plate before you go to the clinic. That doesn't mean the moment you leave your house. When you get close, then you remove it. Lessens the chance of a copy stopping you. When you leave, drive a short distance then put it back on.

        Wear some prosthetics over your face to throw off facial readers. Wear a mask and sunglasses if you have to.

      • or the facial recognition.

        I think the idea is that cell phone tracking can be used to determine if a woman goes to an out-of-state abortion clinic, whereas those other things you've mentioned would require the neighboring pro-choice state to be a tattle-tale. Presumably, a state where abortion is banned isn't going to have any legitimate clinics, so the facial recognition, license plate scanners and jackbooted thugs with a badge won't provide any information beyond that a woman traveled outside of the state.

        Of course, unless you're

        • Remember all you have to do is establish probable cause and you can haul the woman in. So the license plate reader and the facial scan and all of that can detect when you've taken a route that looks like you might be going to get an abortion.

          It doesn't even have to be accurate it just has to establish probable cause. Once that's done you can do a formal criminal investigation. From there you can get somebody's purchase history and you can use that to determine whether or not they were pregnant and wheth
    • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Saturday October 26, 2024 @02:58PM (#64896019)

      Leave your phone at home and take a cab/rideshare if you have an EV, at least for the last leg of the trip.

      Any car where you get OTA updates or have an emergency assist function built in could be (and almost certainly is) tracking you too. At the very least, they're logging the IP you connected from whenever it manages a connection, which can be run though a GIS database to figure out where you were at the time.

      Because yes, in a place where the government has or is trying to criminalize abortion, if they're not already actively hunting you that's only because they haven't figured out the tools just yet... and start being paranoid NOW, because many of those tools are potentially useful retroactively. You don't know what your car manufacturer (or mobile phone provider, or the owner of the mobile network you connected through) are logging, how long they keep those logs, and how friendly they are to government 'requests'.

      And vote Democrat straight-ticket in the upcoming election. You know which party is far, far more likely to get off on tracking you down and punishing you.

      • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

        wouldn't ride share apps require taking a tracking device with you?

      • Leave your phone at home and take a cab/rideshare if you have an EV, at least for the last leg of the trip.

        What's the EV got to do with things? Are you under the impression that modern connected cars are technologies limited to just EVs?

      • You don't even need to leave your phone home, you can just turn it off.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      That is a bit extreme. Just switching it off before it becomes obvious where you are going and removing the battery is quite enough. (You have a removable battery, right?)

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Opsec should really be the last thing that someone seeking an abortion should have to worry about.

      • True. But abortion is a red herring in this instance. Abortion is just one example where details about your location/activities/associations may be used against you by zealots.

    • No mod points, but absolutely correct.

      So far there is no law requiring your cell phone to be with you at all times. I don't know how much longer that will last.

    • by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

      "So, your cell phone was unnaturally still. This gave us probable cause to run your plates and facial id through the camera system. Now we want to know why you were at ."

    • Here is an EFF article on Automatic License Plate Readers: https://sls.eff.org/technologi... [eff.org]
    • We cannot stop them from tracking us

      I was reading this old piece of paper somewhat recently, it said something about "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

    • I have a better idea: don't let the government wield total autocratic control over our lives

  • no phone, 2nd phone, faraday cage. If we are at the point where individual monitoring is the standard, then freedom no longer exists. Unplug and pay cash.
  • ... you need to learn to view the state as an enemy and how to protect yourself. The approach here is not only to switch your phone off, but to remove its battery. (You bought one with removable battery, right?)

    Also remember who is responsible (Trump put those judges on the supreme court) and do _not_ trust any of the supporters of evil. They will just rat you out.

  • Red states compete with each other to be the scariest, and not just on Halloween.

  • Don't give every random app permission to track your location, especially background location permission. That's where this data is coming from. App makers make extra money by selling GPS data on their users to data brokers that sell it to companies like this.

  • Just wanted to leave that subject title here.

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      Don't forget inalienable rights. Americans like to insist that rights are god given or somesuch and also clearly demonstrate that's not the case by bestowing and revoking them based on fashion.

  • If we do like Handmaid's Tail, then the women won't be allowed to carry phones. So they can't be tracked. Duh.

  • So the government bought a tool that can track where any cellphone has been at any time historically, and apparently the only concern worth talking about is the ability to track people at abortion clinics? REALLY?

    OK, I'll play - is the government interested in tracking patients at abortion clinics or anti-abortion protesters outside the abortion clinic? Before you answer, remember that the current, pro-abortion ('pro-choice', if you prefer) administration has a history of putting protesters who do nothing m

    • Yeah but what if the lizard people hook it up to the Jewish space laser control panel? They can then beam COVID-19 vaccine microchips into unborn babies brains & turn them socialist-Democrat. What about the unborn babies? Will nobody think of the unborn babies?!
  • by Mirnotoriety ( 10462951 ) on Saturday October 26, 2024 @07:31PM (#64896553)
    This article was produced with support from the Capitol Forum. [404media.co]

    The Capitol Forum [slashdot.org] is an investigative news and legal analysis company dedicated to informing policymakers, investors, and industry stakeholders on how policy affects market competition.”
  • Seriously, this same user, who's name is the same as one of their founds . . . seems to submit stories several times a week.

    I mean, anyone can submit anything they want, and an editor can approve them, but it's a . . . bit much. Awfully blatant self-promotion.

  • ...be the fruit!
  • Never will either. We see now that this shit goes on all the time, and likely has been for years and years. If you use a smartphone, you are being surveiled and tracked in so many ways. What's even worse is that most of you don't even care, you've deluded yourselves into believing that you're not worth tracking or surveiling, and that the 'convenience' outweighs your irreplaceable privacy being stripped away from you.
    Get rid of your smartphone. At the very least, put it in 'airplane' mode when not actively
  • by RossCWilliams ( 5513152 ) on Saturday October 26, 2024 @10:27PM (#64896819)

    This series of posts certainly demonstrates the inability to have an adult conversation. It will be completely drowned out by people screaming media slogans at one another.

    Has anyone noticed that kids everywhere in the United States are way behind where they should be for their grade? That we have a retirement system that is expensive and leaves almost everyone with an insecure retirement. That we have the most expensive health care in the world, and some of the worst outcomes. That we lead the world in COVID deaths. That students are coming out of college crippled by debt that they never manage to discharge as it gets rolled over from "low interest" student loans to credit cards. That we have millions of people camping out because they can't find a place to live. That the pay of most workers has declined in the last 35 years when adjusted for inflation. That for all the talk about reducing emissions, we aren't reducing emissions at even close to the rate needed to ever halt global warming much less by 2050. That a small number of companies control virtually all of our essential services and don't do a very good job of delivering them.

    In short we have a government that is completely failing to organize a society that serves us well. And the people asking to represent us don't even make a pretense of representing us. They just do celebrity poses and call one another names.

    I am not sure it matters whether we are headed for a police state. If we are there is nothing we can do about it. They are impervious to typical citizens holding them accountable. Unless they offend someone with a war chest of money, they are safe.

    What we are seeing is the Hamiltonian prediction that we are incapable of self-government. Maybe we should take Hamilton's advice and get ourselves a King. At least we would know who is finally in charge and who to blame. A King who knows that if we get too upset with how things are going, we will chop off his head.

If computers take over (which seems to be their natural tendency), it will serve us right. -- Alistair Cooke

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