I am not on FB, Twitter or any other Social Media (SM) and would post frequent warnings on TER about the dangers to personal privacy. I have tried to keep my Android smart phone exposure to a minimum but it is very, very difficult. I need to turn on location for Waze, Google maps and so on and it gets too complicated to try to toggle all the time. In addition, I believe, turning off "location" doesn't completely hide your location, just the precision. (Any techies? Can you explain it better?)
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Even before smart phones (go back to flip phones, slider phones, bar phones, ...), I used to turn OFF my real phone and turn on my hobby phone when going about my business. I have read someplace that turning off a modern smartphone doesn't always render it invisible. (Techies: True? Not true?)
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I am one of those people who LIKES to read the newsworthy stories about the capture of dangerous criminals (repeat: Dangerous Criminals, not misdemeanors) using every available hi-tech method.
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I WANT LE to catch the murderers. I want them to STOP the terrorists. I want them to PROTECT me!
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BUT! I am very concerned about various forms of overreach. The info and the apps are available to LE but should be governed by legitimate warrants. Another danger is that there are apps that enable stalkers to track their targets.
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One possible "good" thing is that the identification of politicians, celebs (Kraft?), and other "powerful" people will lead to any of several things: (1) changes in laws that criminalize certain behaviors - if Kraft (or the Mayor or the Congressman ...) doesn't want to have to worry about being "located" at a spa for criminal prosecution, take that item off the list of reasons that LE can use to seek a warrant to search and use the location data. (2) changes in laws governing who can access location data and for what reasons.
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The solution, for me, is to put me in charge of making all of these decisions. I can assure my TER colleagues, clients and providers, that I will not allow the invasion of privacy for punishing consensual, mutually beneficial, relationships between adults.
If you read the linked article, while also keeping the Jupiter AMP case in mind, it doesn't take much imagination to see how personal privacy is increasingly at risk. Technology continues to develop pervasive and intrusive tools to track and monitor individuals, but we've allowed it because we think our laws and courts will prevent those tools from being used improperly.
When prostitution was merely prostitution, usually a misdemeanor level offense, use of those tools weren't permitted. What's new is the tactic of classifying EVERYTHING as trafficking (or "possible" trafficking), which means all bets are off and the full toolkit of the surveillance state can be used against you. And the media wh*res are fully onboard.
In addition to the electronic means of finding people, there is the new fad of getting your ancestry through DNA testing, which has already found people and arrested them for crimes using said DNA. Often times it was not the person who had their DNA tested that got nabbed but a relative who then led LE to the perp.
Sure, I suppose that there's some good in finding criminals through these means, but the opportunity for power hungry people to control the population through these means boggles the mind.
I'm glad that science has not yet perfected a way to become immortal (Don't worry though, that's coming soon enough.) It's depressing to think what may be coming down the pike next.
What's even more distressing is that, because your DNA shares certain unique traits with some of your relatives, authorities don't need to have your individual DNA on file. If any of your parents, siblings, or other close relatives have submitted their DNA, you're potentially exposed. I'm not an expert so I don't know how far out the net extends (1st cousins? 2nd cousins?), but I believe the key element is the amount of shared maternal DNA. The linked article gives some details on how LE is using this info. It's a fact of life that more of our info is increasingly ending up in some kind of database. What's most concerning is that privacy protections aren't keeping pace and LE knows exactly how to game the system. Even well-intentioned misuse has the potential to ruin innocent lives.
Ultimately, either the courts or the legislatures will have to pass laws restricting LE access to this kind of DNA information without a search warrant. LE never seems to be willing to ask themselves if, just because they can do something, whether or not they should.
Yeah. So nice they swore that oath to protect and uphold our Constitution...
I am not on FB, Twitter or any other Social Media (SM) and would post frequent warnings on TER about the dangers to personal privacy. I have tried to keep my Android smart phone exposure to a minimum but it is very, very difficult. I need to turn on location for Waze, Google maps and so on and it gets too complicated to try to toggle all the time. In addition, I believe, turning off "location" doesn't completely hide your location, just the precision. (Any techies? Can you explain it better?)
.
Even before smart phones (go back to flip phones, slider phones, bar phones, ...), I used to turn OFF my real phone and turn on my hobby phone when going about my business. I have read someplace that turning off a modern smartphone doesn't always render it invisible. (Techies: True? Not true?)
.
I am one of those people who LIKES to read the newsworthy stories about the capture of dangerous criminals (repeat: Dangerous Criminals, not misdemeanors) using every available hi-tech method.
.
I WANT LE to catch the murderers. I want them to STOP the terrorists. I want them to PROTECT me!
.
BUT! I am very concerned about various forms of overreach. The info and the apps are available to LE but should be governed by legitimate warrants. Another danger is that there are apps that enable stalkers to track their targets.
.
One possible "good" thing is that the identification of politicians, celebs (Kraft?), and other "powerful" people will lead to any of several things: (1) changes in laws that criminalize certain behaviors - if Kraft (or the Mayor or the Congressman ...) doesn't want to have to worry about being "located" at a spa for criminal prosecution, take that item off the list of reasons that LE can use to seek a warrant to search and use the location data. (2) changes in laws governing who can access location data and for what reasons.
.
The solution, for me, is to put me in charge of making all of these decisions. I can assure my TER colleagues, clients and providers, that I will not allow the invasion of privacy for punishing consensual, mutually beneficial, relationships between adults.
just don't understand the technology, but in order to maximize my privacy, I have never enabled "location" services on my iphone, and I use VPN on my phone the same as I do on my computers before using ANY internet search engine or visiting any website. I also wear a disposable hazmat suit when disposing of the bodies of people who pissed me off.