Once you build a surveillance system, you can’t control who will use it: > A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI > official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help > track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, according to a new US justice > department report. > > The incident was disclosed in a justice department inspector general’s audit > of the FBI’s efforts to mitigate the effects of “ubiquitous technical > surveillance,” a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and > the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location > data...

Russia is proposing a rule that all foreigners in Moscow install a tracking app on their phones. > Using a mobile application that all foreigners will have to install on their > smartphones, the Russian state will receive the following information: > > * Residence location > * Fingerprint > * Face photograph > * Real-time geo-location monitoring This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Qatar did it in 2022 around the World Cup: > “After accepting the terms of these apps, moderators will have complete > control of users’ devices,” he continued. “All personal content, the ability > to edit it, share it, extract it as well as data from other apps on your > device is in their hands. Moderators will even have the power to unlock users’ > devices remotely.” ...

404 Media is reporting on all the apps that are spying on your location, based on a hack of the location data company Gravy Analytics: > The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company > Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush to dating apps > like Tinder, to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both > Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the > advertising ecosystem­—not code developed by the app creators themselves—­this > data collection is likely happening both without users’ and even app > developers’ knowledge...

This feels important: > The Secret Service has used a technology called Locate X which uses location > data harvested from ordinary apps installed on phones. Because users agreed to > an opaque terms of service page, the Secret Service believes it doesn’t need a > warrant.