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Comment by krunck | Hacker News Reader

Lets not forget that all your personal movements are also recorded by your cell location. The US government has access to all this through various "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" agreements with the corporate data holders.

One must assume that the various "fusion centers" are pulling in all this data and connecting all the dots. Unless you are walking, with a face mask, and without your cell phone you have to assume they know were you are.

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> US government has access to all this through various "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" agreements with the corporate data holders

These claims really need to be more specific to be believable and actionable. Particularly given the law has been changed in reaction to prior fuckery.

It isn't "fuckery" as such. There's just an industry of selling dossiers on individuals, groups, or populations that is way, way more intrusive than what people imagine about online advertising, and they have been doing it for decades. It's data on the open market.

OK but you seem to imply that my live location data is being streamed to NSA-like orgs

(Person you’re responding to isn’t OP.)

Oops

I would expect that the NSA-like orgs have access to the data about where we travel, your spending habits, your comments on Reddit or HN, etc., etc. Basically, a profile on each of us. It might not be a collated readable profile as such, just a vector in a big NN describing our risk potential, but, all the same.

Live state of IMEI corresponding to every cell would be technically easy. Most of the stuff that goofballs imagine the NSA doing are technically impractical or even thermodynamically impossible.

> It isn't "fuckery" as such

§ 215 was fuckery. It was reformed [1]. (Though not repealed.)

> an industry of selling dossiers on individuals, groups, or populations

Agree. But buying reports from data brokers isn't "you scratch my back I'll scratch yours" agreement. That's fuckery again.

To be clear, I'm not denying fuckery is afoot. I'm criticising throwing it out there without an evidenced allegation. Because if we have evidence of fuckery, that’s the priority. If not, it’s the data brokers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act

They can just buy location data from data brokers, same as everyone else.

They actually cannot "just" buy the type of data GP is alluding to, which is telecom cell tower data, and is protected from such warrantless disclosures.

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