Anomaly Six claims it can track the movements of ~3B devices in real time

Yeah it's all passive location datasets. Financial firms have been buying up defunct apps with location data for years to infer trends. Intelligence firms have been doing the same. Then they package and resell between each other to get more data sets. Nothing new here, but a good shock story for The Intercept.

It sounds like you know this kind of business? What should the takeaway be for the rest of us that are not in the know?

There are that many phones though. That information exists due to structure of mobile internet infrastructure.

I'm currently working on a customer satisfaction survey that is sent out after a service has been performed. It is claimed on the survey page that the responses will be anonymous unless the customer checks a box requesting to be contacted. I've had to fight a couple battles about what data will be kept if that box is not checked, because of things like this. No, we cannot log when the email was sent out because that is tied to an event that is logged elsewhere. No, we cannot log what products were involved in the service, because of the same reason. And so on. I told my customer that I'm either making it completely anonymous, or the language on the page has to change. Thankfully I won that battle, and the anonymous responses will be truly anonymous.

Yeah, that is exactly why I don't trust Apple when it says it does data collection with a focus on "privacy" or creates services that claim to "protect your privacy" from others but which in turn give them the opportunity to collect even more user data by re-routing all data through Apple servers.

I enjoyed this quote from the Intercept article:

> “Anomaly Six is a veteran-owned small business that cares about American interests, natural security, and understands the law.”

- Brendan Huff, Anomaly Six co-founder

Really pushing the definition of "small business".

The problem is that users usually have NO CHOICE in the matter. It's "use apps" or "don't use apps", and, actually, it's "use smartphones" or "don't use smartphones". Even where the OS gives the user some choices, users are enticed into letting at least a handful of apps get that kind of data, but the users don't understand the ramifications in the least. And lastly, while these things are disclosed in EUAs and/or other fine print, users a) never read that, b) don't understand the legalese, and/or c) don't understand the ramifications.

Apps shouldn't get data that isn't necessary to perform their function, but their function often is only to advertise to you in exchange for the least functionality possible given to you. E.g., when the app is "free".

It all sucks, but users are used to it all, have given up or never understood in the first place, and it's too late because now the big tech firms are so few and are so vulnerable to nation state arm twisting anyways that they won't fight on behalf of their users.

The ramifications of poor user choices made possible by dark patterns are what we see in TFA. It's like when someone lets <insert-app-here> see their contacts so they can more easily connect with others on that app, and then that app gets to map that user's contacts' relationships and intrude in their privacy. I'm very conscientious about the contacts sharing thing, but I've noticed my friends and acquaintances aren't, therefore I have no privacy even though I try.

In the pre-Internet era, everything we did in public was public, yes, but very little of it could possibly be gathered without expending large amounts of labor to do it. We had some privacy in public. But now everything we do in public is gathered (by many entities!) all the time, and much of what we do in private is actually done in public. Worse, we communicate much more often now, and the metadata is generally public (meaning: there's no privacy in it). Therefore we now have no privacy, in almost anything we do. Even when we're having sex in private, if our devices are in the room they can listen, and sometimes even record video of it. So we have NO privacy at all!!

That's nice in theory, but in practice you get things like GDPR, where you need to submit written requests and provide even more personal identification data (passport photo, ...) to remove your data. And you need to do it one company at a time. And you don't even know the list of companies which have your data.

>Does anyone really think they have security and privacy on the web anymore, if ever?

I mean, there are billions of people less-technically-literate than you, I and the average HN user, so... yes. Absolutely there are people out there that think that.

Shelter + sandboxes google play services sort of achieves this on grapheneos, but, to be convenient, it ends up using one work profile for all the data tracking apps.

I think getting it to something like qubes would be as simple as creating one work profile per app.