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Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users
(www.macrumors.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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So it's not about the notifications or even necessarily the data the app handles; just that there's an apple ID or google ID they're pinging to see who it is.
Today's lesson is: Never use your apple ID or (ugh) google ID for anything important. If you can not use either for anything, great, but we all know we're not international super spies and sometimes you just want to play a card game or something. Still. If someone's unaware that smartphones are tracking devices they should probably know that now.
I'm amazed that Apple was prohibited from saying anything until now.
Just because we're not James Bond today, doesn't mean we won't be a person of interest tomorrow.
That's what's so dangerous, especially for stuff that's just collected for no particular reason. Look at the man who was arrested for a crime simply because he biked through the area during the right time, and his Google location history showed up in a search.
Look at the man who texted photos of his son's genitalia to said son's doctor and got his entire Google account banned when his phone automatically synced them to Gdrive and the algorithm decided he was a pedophile
I don't know if that's a great example tbh. How does Google know it's a medically necessary picture of a child's genitals? Just don't do that. Don't send anyone pictures of your kid's junk. Or anyone's junk for that matter, except maybe your own if you really want to. Certainly not over unencrypted channels. That seems very obvious to me. If your kid's dick is falling off, go to the ER
You missed the point of the examples.
They're cases of people who did nothing wrong but none the less found themselves in trouble because they didn't appreciate how their privacy was being invaded. You can argue about the merits of invading one's privacy to look for child porn, but it is an invasion of privacy, and it's one that a tremendous amount of people are complete unaware of.
That man presumed his phone was secure, and presumed the channel to his doctor was secure. So he sent sensitive images believing the only people that would see them would be the recipient, a licensed medical professional who presumably asked for or at least expected the photos. If what he believed had been true, there'd be no story.
He didn't realize that his photos were synced to g-drive, and he didn't appreciate that images backed up to a cloud are not private, and that no matter what the context, those images would trigger a response. These are all things they were ignorant of until it was too late.
The larger point is that he is not alone. A lot of people truly don't appreciate just how much information of theirs is out there on somebody else's computer, and they do not have the knowledge or the imagination to know how much trouble they could be in one day.