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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

I love how understated (or frankly clueless) these articles are. You should just assume that every mobile phone is reporting high accuracy (< 10m) location information at all times of the day, from tens to thousands of times a day, to a variety of aggregators. Essentially they are little snitches and we are all rats in a maze to their panopticon.

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There's a significant difference from an advertiser learning a little too much about me to the government tracking my every move. Of course, there are risks, but it is beyond the pale for our own governments to be utilizing these tools in this way and this article puts the focus squarely on this part of the problem.

In any case.. I wonder if the solution to all of this is just noise. Our devices should be generating 10x the fake data as it does real data, then we can just salt the information landscape for good and make it useless to try to capture value here.

I used to think privacy was the way, but it's proving more and more impossible to do. I know think that this is the way, begin to generate fake data tons of it all the time, the best defense is a good offense, if we can decrease the signal to noise ratio sufficiently then they can no longer use it, and no I don't have any moral qualms with it because they started the war.

They are the ones who have caused only 1 in 30 emails I receive to be actually something I wanted or find use in. They are the ones who made it so I can no longer use a phone as a communication device within anyone I don't already know. They are the ones sending me random texts and losing my data all over the place, the only way to solve this is to burn back, the politicians won't help they're in bed with all these actors.

If you want a good place to start this add on https://adnauseam.io/ Ad Nasueam is a good place to start, it functions as an add blocker but it also launches a click on every single add that pops up anywhere. If anyone has any other false data generating sources it would be much appreciated.

We need to fight back.

EDIT: Forgot another one http://trackmenot.io/ Track Me Not, it issues random queries to search engines to obsfucate data, when you combine it with adnaseum it is a pretty little counterintel tool.

You can do all that or just opt out. Neither one seems to me to be particularly more burdensome. I grew up without these mobile devices, they are not necessary, just convenient.

Those look like some great tools, but unfortunately I don't think either of them help to obfuscate your location which is the main product of Anomaly 6.

To thwart telcos, you can use https://invisv.com/ or rotate burner SIMs from Mint or Ting. To thwart the OS level tracking we have many alternate OS such as Graphene, Postmarket, and Linux. For app level SDK's which are the primary vector used here, primarily use FOSS apps such as those from fdroid.org and treat any proprietary apps with extreme caution.

Unfortunately due to the 3rd party doctrine most of it is a distinction without a difference. Do I feel the same way about an advertiser knowing my whereabouts all the time as I do the FBI or even local PD? No. But because the latter can legally purchase the information from the former my intuition is potentially wrong.

> There's a significant difference from an advertiser learning a little too much about me to the government tracking my every move

No, there isn't, because the government buys that data.

Or I could assume a corporation that wants my business won't purposefully violate my boundaries and prove themselves untrustworthy.

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