200
How commercially-available phone location data is used by ICE (and other law enforcement agencies) (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

screenshot of text: The material does not say how Penlink obtains the smartphone location data in the first place. But surveillance companies and data brokers broadly gather it in two different ways. The first is from small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs. SDK owners then pay the app developers, who might make things like weather or prayer apps, for their users’ location data. The second is through real-time bidding, or RTB. This is where companies in the online advertising industry place near instantaneous bids to get their advert in front of a certain demographic. A side effect is that companies can obtain data about peoples’ individual devices, including their GPS coordinates. Spy firms have sourced this sort of RTB information from hugely popular smartphone apps.

via this 404 media article: https://www.404media.co/inside-ices-tool-to-monitor-phones-in-entire-neighborhoods/

paywall bypass: https://web.archive.org/web/20260108141914/https://www.404media.co/inside-ices-tool-to-monitor-phones-in-entire-neighborhoods/

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] OpFARv30@lemmy.ml 7 points 6 days ago

Is the baseband isolated?

Yes, the baseband is isolated on all of the officially supported devices.

And

The mobile Atheros Wi-Fi driver/firmware is primarily a SoftMAC implementation with the vast majority of the complexity in the driver rather than the firmware. The fully functional driver is massive and the firmware is quite small.

[-] umbrella@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 days ago

that's actually pretty nice. i didn't know pixels did that.

this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
200 points (99.5% liked)

Privacy

44365 readers
128 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
k_o_t@lemmy.ml
tmpod@lemmy.pt
Yayannick@lemmy.ml
ranok@sopuli.xyz