p
Pretty wow.
Throw your cell phone into the harbor.
I suppose that if I was a criminal I wouldn't want it though.
When signed in to what?
Come on, that’s like thinking it only listens if you say “Hey Siri”.
It’s always listening. Those settings only change how obvious it is.
Every single day
And every word I say
Every game I play
Everywhere I stay
They'll be watching me
I don’t have a smart phone but I have got a desktop computer and my location is off on google. I use duck duck go all the time. But good article.
I’ve tried to avoid being the target of all this data collection for years... it does take some effort and you never really know how successful it was.
However, I’m looking at getting a new truck and the amount of data that it can collect looks to be off the charts. It’s going to be fun to try to figure out how to decouple and remove oneself from all that crap.
Since when are Apple users worried about their leftist government watching them?
Google has already been caught tracking you even without you having location turned on. Yep, turning it off doesn’t stop the tracking. It’s not in your history, but it’s still been done.
How can you tell if Google is invading your privacy? When it says it isn’t, it is.
bkmk
Off the grid.
I was creeped out once when I was waiting in line for my car emissions test. The Yellow Pages app popped a notification: “Will your vehicle pass the emissions test? Make an appointment with a certified auto technician today.”
Ping
Watching the Alex Murdaugh trial, I learned just how much information your cell phone records. It’s insane. They couldn’t have more info on you if you had a crew of FBI agents watching you and taking notes, 24/7.
Last summer we took a vacation trip from Michigan to Denver CO. We stopped for gas right after we entered Iowa, just a couple of miles before we got to the “Iowa 80” gas station, which we had seen on several billboards. A couple of days later, while driving around Denver, listening to XM Sirius radio, we heard an ad for the Iowa 80 gas station. I seriously doubt that an individual gas station in the middle of nowhere would be advertising to EVERY XM radio receiver in the country. This had to be an ad targeted to only our Sirius registration number. In my life, I’ve never heard another Iowa 80 gas station radio advertisement, ever.
For that to happen, though, Google would have to know our gas purchasing history, and, at least, our use of Sirus on our XM radio in the car, and then give that information to Sirius, all without our knowledge. That’s quite a feat.
Bookmark.
It’s not just your phone. It almost every late model car with whatever variant of On-Star your vehicle manufacturer uses. Have a Lo-Jac anti-theft type of device on your car? It tracks and records every movement and catalogs where your car has been.
For starters, if you value your personal security and privacy, don’t use anything made by G**gle. Using ANYTHING with the G**gle name on it is as much as begging for a proctological exam every time you use it. All G**gle services are created on the principle of collecting any and all information on you that they can, any way that they can.
Android can be made less intrusive but you have to be cleverer than the evil geniuses at G**gle who created it (requires rooting, installing android firewall [AFWall_Plus], Magisk [with MicroG module], yadd, yadda, yadda), but that involves a heavy investment in time to mod your phone and then scrounge for solutions to the inevitable bugs and glitches.
A simpler solution is a 3rd-party ROM. Android is ‘open source’ and there are a number of 3rd-parties who have created de-G**gled Android and make it available free. The oldest and best developed is LineageOS, the modern descendant of Cyanogenmod, but they LineageOS doesn’t make ROMS for every phone, and mostly just higher-end stuff (lineageos.org for details). LineageOS ansd MicroG parted ways over philosophical differences but you still can get LineageOS with MicroG built in (from MicroG) but their offerings cover even fewer devices than LineageOS does.
https://www.xda-developers.com/most-popular-custom-roms-android/
If Mark37 can make a go of it, more power to them. Regarding their statement, “the planned obsolescence economy is a fraud and should be stopped,” be advised that if you buy a phone with a non-removable battery, that in itself is “planned obsolescence” because it puts a hard limit on a phone’s lifespan. And $400 is pretty spendy for a used phone that’s already chewed through some undisclosed portion of its battery life.
And BTW, GPS isn’t the only thing that gives away your location. You phone is constantly ‘pinging’ cell towers to remain aware of which ones are closest. And it records the identity of those towers, which can be used to track your location.