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This appears to suggest that smartphone makers (Apple, Google, etc.) are violating privacy agreements and selling user's private data. Has anyone read their privacy agreements lately?
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2025
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Anything that polls location data can record it and sell it, probably more apps that sell it than don't.
This will not help sale of smartphones.
It will not hinder it either. People will give up many things before their smartphones.
Next we'll be reading how android has removed the ability to disable location
Ever wondered what it would have been like if the gestapo had real-time awareness of every citizen's location at all times? You're about to find out.
Trump’s executive order just made anyone who is critical of his administrations criminal conduct a terrorist by royal decree. We all should be armed and prepared to defend ourselves and our families against tyranny. They’re “disappearing” people without accountability. The pedo king literally declared war on citizens for not conforming to his dictatorship. The military was instructed to commit war crimes against American citizens yesterday. Am I misreading the situation?
Is it me or are these ice goons getting fatter everyday? Are they eating the immigrants?
Meal Team 6, Fatstapo, etc.
Bro...my weather app is selling my data? 😦
I just wanted up-to-date travel conditions in a convenient widget. My taxes already pay for the meteorology, why do they need to sell my data too??
My taxes already pay for the meteorology
Yeah, but it got privatized, so now you need to pay more money to a 3rd party to access the services you are already paying money to access.
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A proper Linux phone cannot come soon enough
As much as I would love to have a Linux phone, it will not fully help with privacy. The devices are logged into a cell tower and have a unique ID. This alone makes them trackable.
A removable physical or electronic SIM on a system that has full control of inbound or outbound traffic (linux phone) would still be a whole lot better than nothing. Imagine having a switch to reliably sever any heartbeat signals between the tower and the device at any time.
This would be a flight mode switch that reliably works. But it also means you are offline, which is no solution to the average "daily" problem of being tracked.
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Thanks for including the mirror, OP.
Companies that obtain mobile phone location data generally do it in two different ways. The first is through software development kits (SDKs) embedded in ordinary smartphone apps, like games or weather forecasters. These SDKs continuously gather a user’s granular location, transfer that to the data broker, and then sell that data onward or repackage it and sell access to government agencies.
The second is through real-time bidding (RTB). When an advert is about to be served to a mobile phone user, there is a near instantaneous, and invisible, bidding process in which different companies vie to have their advert placed in front of certain demographics. A side-effect is that this demographic data, including mobile phones’ location, can be harvested by surveillance firms. Sometimes spy companies buy ad tech companies out right to insert themselves into this data supply chain. We previously found at least thousands of apps were hijacked to provide location data in this way.
I really despise these practices. I don't know how people can build these tools with a clear conscience.
It’s the same for anyone who works for Meta or MS or Google or Anduril or whatever these days: you look at your comp package that’s worth roughly half a million annually, and you say
They have been paying people to not have morals for quite a while now.
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This reminds me of something... What was it... Hmm...
And that was before the NSA leaks.
And in case it wasn't already clear enough how absurd this all is, the creeps at Palantir are now actually so brazen as to officially call one of their mass surveillance systems "Project Gotham"...brave new world.
I guess calling it "Project Barad Dur" was a bit too on the nose after they named themselves Palantir.
Yes, maybe a bit much, but it would have been very fitting, since the marketing is obviously aimed specifically at the villains of the world—perhaps for the next project.
It's quite telling of the times we live in that you can make it so obvious these days. You'd think that at least some concealment of the intentions behind these mass surveillance products would be appropriate, but I guess with people like Trump in the White House, Putin in the Kremlin, Netanyahu in Israel, and many others of that caliber, it's no longer necessary.
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