Military Unit Conducting Drone Strikes Bought Location Data from Ordinary Apps | Hacker News Reader

Military Unit Conducting Drone Strikes Bought Location Data from Ordinary Apps

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Don't worry about ad tracking - nothing similar could happen here! All the intelligence gathered on you will be used only for more relevant ads, guaranteed.

Your employer, the police, military, school system, insurance companies, industry conglomerates, and foreign or domestic governments, won't get or abuse any of it.

Sure seems like its past time to put down the smartphones, close the social media accounts, and be done with as much of this garbage as possible.

I’ve got myself down to < 20 minutes of screen time on my smartphone, daily. Now to see if I can make it the final distance, and be free.

Do you just print out everything you want to read from the web?

I sit down at a desktop, and do what I must there.

Edit: To be honest, I made this reply from my phone. I'm as addicted as anyone to these devices, and its why I've put so much effort into curtailing my usage. Edited from a desktop :)

This is the only site that I post on. I've deleted all other accounts and blocked the sites on the router.

You give me hope, and a bit of joy since I'm not alone.

Moral: If anything can be used against you, the adversary who will use it against you can get it and use it against you.

This happens with domestic law enforcement as well. During the lockdown there were several articles about federal agencies relying on private companies for location data. It says something that both the military and federal government have been outmatched in their tracking abilities by silicon valley.

I wouldn't assume that's unintentional. The Feds probably love having that level of indirection built in. Eases warrent requirements, and you don't get news headlines about government trackers in your devices.

I take a more extreme view. My confidence that it is absolutely intentional and that significant planning went in to arrive at this point is in the region of 99%.

why waste resources when people -voluntarily- give their info up? It would make no logical sense.

If the damn thing is free, you're the product :/

I used to work for a company that sold location tracking data. It was amazing how cheap this data is and how many sources you can collect it from. We would buy data from 3rd party sources and often have our own data sold back to us, sometimes straight up, and sometimes after randomization added to avoid exact matches. We had a whole system built to compare incoming data against our own data to make sure that we weren't having too much of our own data being sold to us.

They're not even remotely close to outmatched. The difference is the IC and the military can't collect intelligence inside of the United States. They're perfectly well allowed to use commercial and public data, though.

So all the military, government, police, medical, utility, CEO, infrastructure, and other people also have their location data in these databases. How do they all feel about this?

Apart from the other issues discussed here: what about false positives?

In the advertising case the cost of a false positive is a misplaced ad. In the case of a military strike the cost is getting the wrong person.

Plus the level of security on a commercial product is lower (the risk of losing data is simply an insurable cost). So that false positive could be deliberate insertion of bogus data. If I wanted to get rid of a rival I could pay to have ID info for someone the US doesn’t like inserted into the rival’s home or workplace. Boom!

I'd doubt the military launched a lethal strike based solely on phone info. More likely this info helps locate a person and then they're identified by more than a geo tag.

One can hope, but I’m not so sanguine.

My experience has been that first-world militaries go to extraordinary lengths to avoid shooting the wrong thing. It’s not that they don’t get it wrong occasionally, but I don’t think your cynicism is warranted.

The drone strike program is directed by the CIA, not the military. It was placed under the command of the military briefly during the Obama administration but the Trump and Biden administrations have reversed this.

Fair point. Thanks for the correction.

A good reminder that allowing unrestrained commercial exploitation of personal data can have serious repercussions.

This is it. This is the end-game of the dragnet surveillance work that employs a significant population of Hacker News.

You have literally turned cell phones into an informant which is used to fucking murder the user.

You are complicit in this.

This, so much. People were getting icky a few years ago when I said I was working in crypto, as it if was below what a geek should aspire to - but it felt so much better than the alternative: I was providing something people were asking for, nothing else. There was no ads or engagement issues.

I feel sad for all the people who have golden handcuffs (vesting, lifestyle) at a FANG job, basically selling dopamine hits and eyeball time - up to enabling murder in this case.

I have very little morals on principles. I copied mine from someone I know: I will not work for the mob / organized crime ie what use violence against people, and that is true in all of its extensions: so that includes the government, the military, and any company that is deeply involved in business with them.

Highly suggested for personal happiness!

Lots of crypto burns incredible amounts of electricity, adding to climate change, which also will lead to a lot of deaths. Maybe lots of tech is nuanced.

Okay, well let's engage that nuance then. Is that climate change intrinsic to the concept of crypto or just an implementation detail? Conversely, is addiction intrinsic to the concept of engagement optimization, or just an implementation detail?

You could theoretically make arguments both ways, but I think that practically speaking, high burn is an implementation detail for crypto (and one that's actively being deprecated) whereas addiction is an indelible part of the concept of engagement optimization.

Appreciate this perspective. There are a lot of issues with the space of crypto that I can think of, but the truth is (especially with the past year or two), it's increasingly one of the few spaces that holds some kind of positive hope for technology which I can think of. I'm considering moving into the space myself, workwise.

Are there any complaints you have about the space compared to other spaces you've worked in? It seems like you're pretty happy in the medium to long-term with your decision, which I think says a lot.

> Are there any complaints you have about the space compared to other spaces you've worked in?

The first time you go to an after party with colleagues and someone innocently says to you "Want some cocaine?", it can be surprising.

But if you can keep your head cool, you realize it's just a bunch of rich people who enjoy the good life and genuinely want to share the good things. Then you get rich too and you get along much better!

So no complaints, just be ready for some funny experiences at first :)

Now, if you genuinely want to get in, you need to learn.

Install a BTC, BCH or DOGE full node (because they are essentially the same software, except DOGE is cheaper ATM), get some coins, make transactions. Then do the same with a Monero client. Do some transfer of fiat to DOGE, then find a website to convert that to XMR. Understand the processes and the risks - when you can get defrauded and how.

Once it's done, try some mining: CPU mining with XMR is still accessible, and will teach you the ropes.

Then it's time to move to DEFI: install an ethereum full node, get some ETC (cheaper than ETH and essentially the same thing like DOGE/BCH/BTC). Do a few transfers and try to write smart contracts - an oracle is something nice to play with. Try to interact with other chains - there's WBTC but a lot of other ways too!

Once you're done with all this, you will have a better idea of the main areas in the field: payments and custody (BTC), mining, defi. These are the basis.

Make some offline wallets to keep a few coins of each (you can check the prices on the likes of cryptomarketplot.com) and find a company to apply to. The field is so new that nobody really expects some experience, and having played with all the basic technology will open doors.

Sorry, I don't mean from a complete beginners perspective. I'm pretty familiar with how crypto works -- I've held some crypto for a while (not large quantities mind you, but enough here and there to develop the curiosity in the first place). I meant more along the lines of, I've never considered making it my full-time job before by working at company focused on crypto, and what I'm curious about is what things you like about working in the field and what things you may not.

For example, my friends that work in the field have mentioned that for better and worse, there's the double edged sword of evangelism which can be very positive in so far as people are really enthusiastic about its positive potential. But it can also backfire because there's sometimes tunnel vision that can come from a lack of adequate skepticism and reasoning from first principles with respect to legacy finance.

I guess that's along the line of questioning which I was curious about from your end. Sorry for being so vague!

> double edged sword of evangelism

Yes, you want to keep a cool head. I didn't mean just for the cocaine, but for everything else too.

This is because you will find all kind of people there - including a few crooks that are still left from the early days, but also great hackers of the kind that you won't find anymore in regular startups.

But it's no different than any other job IMHO, it just evolves faster and has greater upsides.

> also great hackers of the kind that you won't find anymore in regular startups.

Amazing, this is exactly what I was trying to put my finger on. I was kind of getting a gut feeling of this very special kind of OG hacker vibe which is quite rare, and honestly that's a /huge/ part of what made me interested in the space to begin with. It's as you say, a variety that you won't find anymore in regular startups, and that's exactly what makes it so exciting.

Thanks for sharing, I again really appreciate your perspective :)

How could you say working in crypto isn't enabling organized crime?

Ransomware attacks on hospitals killed more people than drone strike using app location data.

Ross Ulbricht used crypto to build a criminal empire and to try to murder people.

Whether you’re a target for an ad or JADM, it’s all the same to these people.

I wonder how much time and effort went in from the side of government to arrive at a point where they can manipulate the free market to help them kill people.

Other users have rightly pointed that getting this support from outside sources eases their legal burdens both domestically and abroad. It just seems wrong that a government can bypass its own checks and balances in this way. It violates the principles it was founded on.

The invasion is the companies selling (or giving for free, in Android's case) your private information to brokers and the government, like Gestapo or Stasi informers.

When one can print infinite money, publicly traded companies will hand over the data whether they like it or not, eventually...

Librem 5. Purism needs to get the supplies up faster

Doesn't mean much if folks just install all the BestFreeApp and TorchApp and FreePrayerApp on it, which then proceeds to spy on them in real-time.

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