ICE knocks on ad tech's data door to see what it knows about you
theregister.com
theregister.com
Who needs the Chinese surveillance system when adtech companies will create mass surveillance for their own profit that the government can use for free?
Why are people thinking this is new? Your data down to your current browser session and current location have been sold as much as possible for almost 30 years. Tracking pixels replaced tracking cookies that is linked to your habits and metadata heuristics can pick a single person out of the noise of thousands doom scrolling the same dumb information.
And the .gov has been using it for quite some time - data brokers sell it as readily as adtech has sold your habits to .com. Best part for them - they do not need a judicial oversight to access it and they have unlimited resources to pay for it - look at CALEA.
I doubt they are looking for protesters in general. But it does make it easier for them to "target" people not aware or smart enough to maintain good OPSEC.
Give a prepaid to homeless along with a month long bus pass... let 'em ride all over town.
If you know the state, the median number of bits needed is 23. If you know the city, around 10 bits is all you need to identify you as a unique individual.
A drunk raccoon with one eye and a missing paw can sieve out 10 bits of information about a particular person.
You can do probabilistic assumptions and segment the population by fuzzy characteristics you get, like stylometry, assumptions about native language, interests, etc. For a giant database like the spies and agencies have, they can do probablistic ID with extreme accuracy based on a tiny number of leaked bits.
If you snag a giant pile of readily available website data, then tag the person of interest based on that data, then any time you process new data, you can get a probability of that new data being associated with an already known person. Set a five nines threshold, or higher, and then assume those matches are legitimate, and you can chip away at all sorts of identity handles. From there, you can start doing contrastive searches, sieving out known quantities, improving the statistical accuracy of those fuzzy parameters.
Deanonymization and such is borderline trivial, consumer compute is about 5 generations past the threshold where a global database would be considered particularly difficult or challenging.
Fingerprinting is very easy, but obfuscating it is incredibly challenging, with all of the implicit, deliberately leaky data transactions that are imposed on us.
I can tell you know what you are talking about here, but communicating this to the masses is difficult to why this matters or how bad it is. Unfortunately there’s a strong industry incentive to keep the status quo.
I take the more cynical view privacy is impossible to participate online, let alone anonymity, and would love a disruptor in the space, but at this point, I’ve become so cynical that participating as minimally as possible in it seems the only real solution. But I am not fatalistic, and cannot expect people to consume things the way I do, so I keep trying. You can’t really fight it in any real way, so my approach has been monitoring, observing, informing, and learning.