They definitely are. I know for a fact that they are running massive Hadoop clusters storing information on DNS records involved in their customer traffic. If I recall correctly they mirror a lot of the traffic to analytics environments.
We still need to encrypt the accessed resource and DNS queries everywhere.
Even once that’s done, things like opencaching will be used by SPs to gather tons of data where they participate.
I'm guessing we're just trusting Google here (and Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 who now also does 10gb free VPNs) + the good will of engineers with access to this information within Google.
... and I'm sure their shareholders are pressing them to forego the greater revenue from subscriber data so they can keep their dividend cheques comfortably small.
The last time I looked, the csrf token issued by the homepage of one of the big three mobile carriers was "undefined."
But the limits of using google DNS (or even encrypted DNS) is that most commercial websites aren’t sharing IP addresses, so I bet the ISP can pretty much reconstruct the data it would get from DNS with very little effort just by looking at your IP traffic and mapping IP addresses to domains from other users DNS queries.
Google was buying MasterCard records: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-30/google-an...
But I don't believe they can't do much from an IP alone. Unless the ISP starts ratting us out.
2001.
Everyone is not obsessed with turning data into revenue. Most smaller tech companies (ie. Sub billions in revenue) are not in the game of monetizing data. My feeling is the market exists mostly between very well establish and very large companies (such as ISPs, advertising networks), but that same market doesn’t exist between newer / smaller companies that haven’t reached massive scale.
To anyone in the EU: is GDPR something that your non-technical friend will have heard of and knows what it is? Or is it similar to the US, where 75% of people probably haven’t heard of it or if they have, couldn’t say what the regulation does.
As far as I remember, they still sell some anonymized data (they had some demos on how to plan public transport with location data) and I'd bet they are not doing much with DNS data.
Basically everyone who is in EU needs to keep GDPR in mind. Especially if you are employed, then you need to keep in mind GDPR for the interests of your employer so that they are abiding the law, and won't get fined. It is actually legal people who know GDPR very well; not so much tech people. In a lot of Dutch companies a "functionaris gegevensbescherming" (FG; data protection officer) is mandatory, who basically deal with PII, and have known about GDPR (AVG) ever since it was announced it was going to be active (2 years before it was active). The Dutch professional association for the data protection officer was founded in 2003 [1].
On top of that, it was widely covered in newspapers, daily news, etc. If you are in EU and you have not heard about it you are living under a rock, or you're not a working adult (nothing wrong with either).
Maybe people will know it as the cause of cookie popup screens. But I'm also grossly over-estimating computer literacy among the general population so maybe not.
edit: you can see this clearly in the way they pay lip service to "breaking up big tech" (whether or not that's a good idea, this comment is not a statement of opinion on that subject) because it's politically sexy on both sides, while all these other, arguably more egregious abuses of consumer data are so far off the radar that most people probably aren't aware they're happening.
The legal department would care about that.
(Does that make sense? No, he'd make more sense as an example. But that's not what the comment said.)
The devs have often said things bad idea and raise concerns unfortunately you generally have no power, the decision to implement something is made above you. Generally the people making the decisions know things are questionable but you need to make your KPIs / get promoted / earn more money for the company etc etc.
If you don't follow a direct order and refuse to work on a piece of work in reality you will be fired.
That leaves you with the option of looking for a new job yourself or being forced to find a new job as you was kicked out.
While some people can take the moral highground, outright refuse and resign, others have to deal with life issues such as paying the bills and supporting a family which makes it extremely hard to pick a fight refusing to do something. We do not like to think it but we are just another cog in the wheel and dispensable.
Only negative I would mention is that some things are a little bit harder to setup, like a VPN for example (and it doesn't support OpenVPN over UDP).
Thinking knowledge, intelligence or capability correlates with ethics is a category error.
Courses like that don't fix unethical people, but they make the rest of us aware that ethical concerns exist. Software/Computer Science is such a young discipline that, industry-wide, I don't think we've learnt that one from the other industries yet.
The bigger problem, IMO, is that many tech companies have started handing out kool-aid that data collection and analytics is ethical. They justify it by saying that it helps people avoid spam, or get better advertisements, or whatever, and then the engineers think they are being ethical and beneficial to society by building these systems.
I took a business ethics course in undergrad, and it was surprising how many students advocated all sorts of (to me) aberrant ethical views. (Note I’m pretty traditional, morally speaking. The environment was strongly postmodern, and this was before all the modern insanity about “free speech is bad because some people say bad/offensive things”.)
Not that I minded personally, but it was a strong lesson to me that teaching people categories and how to think won’t give them a desire to respect any particular brand of morality.
To be totally fair, the idea "free speech is bad because some people say bad things" is older than the mind of man can remember.
Yes, it's just that we've only recently been allowed to talk about it openly.
The objective of those ethical classes is to move the neutral/good majority in hope in hope to counterbalance the unethical minority.
On top of that, companies which are usually regarded as some of the most unethical companies on the planet (especially in regards to privacy) are companies like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which are worshipped by and have computer science people scrambling to get hired by them. Going back a little further in history, before FAANG, the companies that were revered by the tech world were the very same ISPs that this post is railing against.
Programmers as a whole seem to have no problem at all being unethical as long as it gets them either money or the chance to work on the latest tech fad.
Just look at the resistance on this forum to the idea of GDPR or data privacy bills. This is one of the most self-aware forums on the internet and still probably a majority of users are not only aware of who (and what) is signing their paychecks, but they actively endorse it in their personal discourse during their time off too.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/nsa-att-intercept-surveill...
Cisco collects more than 24TB of DNS query data every day. Here's a Cisco employee demonstrating the kinds of horrifying analytics they perform on this data https://www.first.org/resources/papers/conf2018/Mahjoub-Dhia...
The age-old answer: money.
Modern silicon valley is built off people implementing similar pervasive tracking, without it there is no google, facebook and many other startups. Not to mention online newspapers and everyone who makes money indirectly from the tracking.
I agree it's a bad thing, but that ship sailed long ago and things like the GDPR are only just starting to bring it back.
Implementing the mis-feature on a public ISP will be done by people who think the matter isn't worth risking their job by taking a stand on, and just saying no once the decision has been made several levels above their rank won't help anyone because if they don't implement the feature their replacement will.
Developers may be in a pretty sweet situation, generally, but if you don't have money saved or another job lined up you don't have much choice.
I also think that people are great at finding excuses for what we're doing. I've read somewhere about a hypothesis that conscious thought is mostly just intellectual justification for subconscious urges.
And that's why I use VPN services. But the same is true for VPN services, regarding US and/or other TLAs. So I use nested VPN chains, to make it harder to get complete data.
And when it really matters, I add Tor to the mix. Even if it's heavily infiltrated by US TLAs, there's at least the chance that it's also heavily infiltrated by TLAs of US adversaries. So, Dog willing, maybe they cancel each other out, at least somewhat.
Almost by definition, that means you're worth taking a closer look at.
Once you're under the microscope, you'd better hope your opsec is flawless or that your activities are completely boring, or else the $TLA knows exactly what you've been up to, TOR or not.
Disclosure: my activities are completely boring, and I don't use Tor, VPNs, or anything like them.
Not if you access tor over VPN. VPN hides all traffic from ISP and Gov. Obviously, make sure your browser does not use Google or Cloudflare DNS.
Except that you don't need to trust anyone, entirely.
That's the point of nested VPN chains. Let's say that you have three different VPN services in the chain. The first VPN knows your ISP-assigned IP address, and the IP address of the second VPN server. The second VPN knows the IP address of the first VPN server, and the IP address of the third VPN server. The third VPN knows the IP address of the second VPN server, and the IP address of the site that you're accessing.
An adversary would need information from all three VPNs, or from their data centers and/or ISPs.
I don't use hardware that I've purchased using my meatspace identity. The machines mainly come from yard sales and swap meets. Typically nowhere near where I've lived. And all purchased with cash. So I'm pretty confident that they're not backdoored. I have purchased SSDs from stores, but also for cash.
I'm relatively confident that Debian hasn't been backdoored. Windows perhaps, but I rarely use it, and only in VMs.
But no, I haven't done that.
I mainly depend on compartmentalization. This VM runs on a host that contains no information about my meatspace identity. And the machine with that information is on a different LAN.
Edit: But upon reflection, I have done something like that. Sometimes I run remote dedicated servers. Accessed via Tor (via nested VPNs) and paid with well-mixed Bitcoin. With LUKS and dropbear, of course.
If I run VirtualBox, I can basically do the same thing I do locally. I use pfSense VMs as VPN gateways, to create nested VPN chains. And then Whonix instances, which hit Tor through those VPNs. And I access the remote VMs via VRDP via SSH via Tor etc.
It is expensive, I suppose. In that you must pay for multiple VPN services. I probably spend a few hundred dollars per year, on average. But that's ~nothing for me.
But it's not that difficult to configure. I use pfSense VMs as VPN routers. And pfSense has a very intuitive WebGUI. To create nested VPN chains, I just successively NAT one VPN router through another. Using VirtualBox internal networks. And pfSense optimizes MTU automatically.
Once it's setup, you just run the VMs, and it works.
VPN like... Onavo?
No, VPN like AirVPN, IVPN, Mullvad or PIA.
That's not what our logs show.
Self-interest rears its head, though. If you don't have anything to hide, running Tor is extra work you don't gain any benefit from. Arguably you just subsidize those who use the tools for evil.
I have yet to be convinced that full anonymity is actually a societal good.
As a pragmatic defense against corrupt governmental agencies, it is probably useful.
I'm not so sure it's a net gain for society as a whole.
And, in a nutshell, I suppose that's why I've never gone down this road.
I'm not trying to say Tor is all bad, just explain why I don't use it and why I'm not sure it's an unmitigated good.
I don't agree with that argument. Because ISPs can already do that. And for most people, their ISP is far more likely to be cooperating with their local adversaries than some random VPN service is.
And for what it's worth, one of Tor's inventors (Paul Syverson) has agreed publicly that there are reasons to access Tor through VPNs. Basically, when you don't want your ISP to know that you're using Tor. Indeed, if I were a CIA agent using Tor in Iran, I probably wouldn't want the ISP to know that I was using Tor.
But I don't trust VPN services either. So I use nested VPN chains. That's basically the same approach that Tor itself uses, routing traffic through multiple (three) relays. So no one relay (or for me, VPN service) knows both who I am, and what I'm doing online.
There's also the issue of trusting the Tor network. Some argue that it's compromised by US TLAs. So with a nested VPN chain between me and entry guards, I'm less concerned that some TLA is running them. But even if that's just paranoia, there have been bugs that deanonymized users.
For example, some years ago, CMU researchers exploited the "relay-early" bug to allow malicious entry guards and exit relays to exchange information, and so learn that they were routing the same circuit. That allowed said CMU researchers to deanonymize Tor users. The FBI learned of this, and subpoenaed the data. And lots of people went to jail over it. Mostly drug dealers and child pornographers, but whatever.
However, routing VPN services through Tor is a totally different matter. If you do that, your anonymity depends entirely on how anonymously you've obtained, paid for, and used the VPN service. If you used an email address that's linked to you, you're screwed. If there's a money trail in paying for the VPN service, you're screwed. If you ever use the VPN account without Tor, you're screwed.
And even if you manage all that anonymously, the very fact of using a VPN through Tor decreases your anonymity. That's because Tor by default switches circuits at ten minute intervals. But when a VPN is connected through a Tor circuit, that circuit is pinned. So by using a VPN through Tor, you've blocked one way it increases anonymity.
Even if there were laws and regulations that better protected privacy, you couldn't count on that. You can't trust government agencies, because they stretch the limits, and outright lie about what they do.
I also do it because it's fun.
And anything that likes a persisted connection is likely to get a lot of connection resets. Like websockets (slack) or irc
VPNs through Tor also aren't substantially slower than Tor alone. And indeed, one can use MPTCP to aggregate multiple VPN-via-Tor connections. But only between suitably configured devices, of course.
Seriously, higher latencies and lower traffic peaks likely improve anonymity.
But Mozilla switching people is a worry for me. Sure people “have a choice” but in reality expecting the average Joe who doesn’t even know what DNS is to make an informed decision about it is unrealistic.
Meanwhile Mozilla has started sending a list of every domain you visit to a US company subject to US law enforcement. Not ideal.
Do you have an article which explains this?
- How was the DNS logged?
- Was every query logged, or only unique queries?
- Was it combined with other data?
- How long was it searchable for?
- What were the DNS queries used for? Simply sold to 3rd parties? If so, who was buying?
And in anonymous, aggregated form (e.g. only include domains that were accessed by multiple customers, the frequency per day and domain name, maybe geographical data precise to a region corresponding to a million people), I would be perfectly fine with this, even if it gets sent to ad companies. I'd not like it, but I'd also not see the harm and there is a lot of money involved, so if we can't stop it then I'll be fine with it in a basic form (aggregated). At least until we decide that trying to optimize manipulating/influencing people is brainwashing (I'm undecided whether playing psychological tricks on people while they try to get groceries or look for information online or whatever is morally okay).