Hacker News Reader

Comment by _vere | Hacker News Reader

Netzpolitik.org actually reported on what you can do with this type of data a while ago. They tricked a databroker into getting a free sample of geolocation data, 3.6 billion datapoints. They were able to build individual movement profiles for people and link that with real identities by putting just a little bit of work in. For a government with access to stuff like palantir this would mean a full movement profile for pretty much everyone with a phone. German article about movement profiles: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/databroker-files-firma-verschle... Broader article about their research into the databroker topic: https://netzpolitik.org/2024/databroker-files-die-grosse-dat... Wired article for English speakers: https://archive.ph/DmWrw Wired frames this a little strange, around how the government is powerless to stop it and such, especially considering how they now actively admit this is in their interest.

View on HN

I remember some journalists used (currently legal) meta-data from data brokers to track the movement of some politicians and later confronted them with it: they were now very much opposed to this being legal.

Now, it seems like someone would need to do that for capital hill .. and then make sure politicians are not voting a law that only exempts them from meta data collection and usage.

Someone really should put up a website that tracks US politicians' locations in real time. It's clear that our government only cares when directly and personally threatened.

They’ll just make a list of which people it’s illegal to track, and keep tracking the rest of us.

The state of the art has advanced so far in doing this. I remember way back in 2017, 9 years ago now, at the Scaled ML conference, Claudia Perlich gave a presentation about using RTB data to target ads. When she got to slide 23 [1] my jaw hit the floor. This was a small ad targeting company, and again, 9 years ago. Here's what they publicly said they had:

Consumer Events:

• 100B DailyEvents

• 20+ data integrations

• Clickstream

• App usage

• Ecommerce sales

• Cash register sales

• Precise Location

Context Data:

• User

• Device

• Location

• URL

• IP

• 200 Million Devices Daily

Universal DataStore

• 50 Trillion Record Consumer History

That's about 150,000 datapoints on everyone in the U.S. For a small company. In 2017.

[1] https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/6212008/ScaledML%20Media%20Ar...

The personalization stuff is why I avoided ML like the plague - all these folks making huge money but all of it to build a surveillance state for advertisers. Already having value my privacy enough to never work for an ad revenue company, they all seemed beyond the pale.

See also Dark Data from DEFCON 25: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yWqdTVQsnPg

But it doesn't need to be marketed in such a sinister fashion. In 2012 when Google Maps informed me of delays along my usual commute, complete with a GPS trace of my route home, completely unprompted, I started turning off location history (lol, yeah right). I didn't even know they were collecting that data, much less analysing it that hard.

These days, that would be considered a feature - not a dystopian hellhole, and you would be a Luddite for turning off this new smartphone augmented brain. The product will make you happy. [0]

Welcome, to City 17. You have chosen, or been chosen, to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers. It's safer here.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=5PZ73nLZaqc

There was a great piece published back during the Patriot Act debates where a princeton or harvard professor used modern math techniques and tavern records to triangulate for arrest the early Patriots and their meeting spots. It was a great article.

Got a link to this? Sounds like a fun read.

Not OP, but here you go.

OP had it slightly wrong though: it's not tavern records but membership lists of colonial Boston organizations, and the author is a sociology professor (Kieran Healy), not from Princeton or Harvard.

He uses basic social network analysis on historical membership data to identify Paul Revere as the key figure among 254 colonists using nothing but "metadata." The whole thing is written as a satirical report by a British intelligence analyst in the 1770s, which makes it a pretty effective commentary on the "it's just metadata" argument from the NSA debates.

Link: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

Isn't he also making the point that's a very effective way to triangulate the leaders of an org? That's just going to reinforce the NSA's inclination to do so.

I think the argument is that NSA already knows exactly how valuable metadata is, while the average person significantly underestimates its importance without a concrete demonstration.

The same NSA that publicly states "We kill people over metadata"?

If that's the type of things they say publicly at conferences we can only imagine what a more sensitive comment would look like. How anyone can underestimate the importance of that is beyond me.

spread a false story in public news and monitor cell call graphs.

Not only is it likely very easy/possible to track everyone with a phone but it has now got to the point where "movement without a cellphone present" is a red flag.

"Hey...why is this guy suddenly deviating from his normal routine? License plate readers show him 100 miles out of his normal area. Why did he leave his phone at home?"

Just like social media. Not participating is considered suspicious.

Anyone with Govt. level access (or billionaire level access) can very easily put all this data together.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com