America’s border-protection agency “can track everyone’s cars all over the country thanks to massive troves of automated license plate scanner data, a new report reveals,” reports Ars Technica. And they didn’t need to request search warrants from the courts, the article explains, since “the agency did just what hundreds of other businesses and investigators do: straight-up purchase access to commercial databases.”
U.S….
Tag: location data
Mobilewalla Used Cellphone Data To Estimate the Demographics of Protesters
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BuzzFeed News: On the weekend of May 29, thousands of people marched, sang, grieved, and chanted, demanding an end to police brutality and the defunding of police departments in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. They marched en masse in cities like Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, and…
Google Says It Will Keep Less Browser History and Location Data By Default
Google said Wednesday it was changing the defaults on its services in an effort to store less browser history and location data on its servers. NBC News reports: Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post that the first time a person turns on location history, the default option would be for the data to be stored for 18 months….
Cell Phone Pings Lead Investigators to Buried Bodies
Slashdot reader rufey writes: Earlier this month, the bodies of two children were discovered buried in the backyard of Chad Daybell, the current husband of the childrens’ mother, Lori. In the recently released probable cause document released this week, it was revealed that location data obtained from cell phone GPS and tower pings from persons of interest played a large role…
IRS Used Cellphone Location Data To Try To Find Suspects
The Internal Revenue Service attempted to identify and track potential criminal suspects by purchasing access to a commercial database that records the locations of millions of American cellphones. The Wall Street Journal reports: The IRS Criminal Investigation unit, or IRS CI, had a subscription to access the data in 2017 and 2018, and the way it used the data was revealed…
ACLU Sues LA Over Controversial Scooter Tracking System
The American Civil Liberties Union sued Los Angeles Monday over the city’s requirement that electric scooter rental companies provide anonymized real-time location data. The Verge reports: The lawsuit centers on the Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s use of a digital tool called the Mobility Data Specification program (MDS), which the agency created as a way to track and regulate electric scooters…
Google Sued by Arizona Over Location Data and Alleged Consumer Fraud
Google has been hit by a lawsuit filed by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, alleging the search giant deceived its users in order to collect location data from their phones. From a report: The company generates the vast majority of its revenue through its massive advertising operation, which is buttressed by personal information Google collects when people use its products. But…
North Dakota’s COVID-19 App Has Been Sending Data To Foursquare and Google
The official COVID-19 contact-tracing app for the state of North Dakota, designed to detect whether people have potentially been exposed to the coronavirus, sends location data and a unique user identifier to Foursquare — and other data to Google and a bug-tracking company — according to a new report from smartphone privacy company Jumbo Privacy. From a report: The app, called…
Slack Now Strips Location Data From Images
Slack has started to strip uploaded photos of their metadata. What may seem like an inconsequential change to how the tech giant handles storing files on its servers, it will make it far more difficult to trace photos back to their original owners. From a report: Almost every digital file — from documents on your computer to photos taken on your…
Apple, Google Ban Use of Location Tracking in Contact Tracing Apps
Apple and Alphabet’s Google on Monday said they would ban the use of location tracking in apps that use a new contact tracing system the two are building to help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus. From a report: Apple and Google, whose operating systems power 99% of smart phones, said last month they would work together to create a…