Privacy advocates gained access to a powerful tool bought by U.S. law enforcement agencies that can track smartphone locations around the world. Abortion clinics, places of worship, and individual people can all be monitored without a warrant.

Privacy advocates got access to Locate X, a phone tracking tool which multiple U.S. agencies have bought access to, and showed me and other journalists exactly what it was capable of. Tracking a phone from one state to another to an abortion clinic. Multiple places of worship. A school. Following a likely juror to a residence. And all of this tracking is possible without a warrant, and instead just a few clicks of a mouse.

  • dohpaz42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2061·
    10 hours ago

    This should be illegal. There is absolutely no good reason this should be available to anybody. It should also be considered unconstitutional; if one of those dots is a person, whether you directly know who the person is or not, it should violate the right to privacy and the right of illegal search and seizure — no questions asked.

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      The solution is to subscribe to these services. Then create a website that offers real-time tracking information, freely to the public, of the most wealthy and powerful people in the country. Every Congressperson should have their location shown freely available to all in real time. You could call it “wheresmyrep.org” or similar. Literally all of them tracked like animals in real time, freely shown for any and all to see. Let them live in the fish bowl they’ve created for us all.

    • 【J】【u】【s】【t】【Z】@lemmy.worldEnglish
      191·
      7 hours ago

      Search and seizure, the Fourth Amendment, only applies to State actors. The only exception is when a private entity is acting as an agent of the government, such as in the case of private prisons.

      Congress needs to pass consumer protection laws aimed at privacy in the digital age. They haven’t updated this sort of thing I believe since 1996. It used to be legal for adult video stores to disclose the tapes people rented, but Congress passed a privacy law forbidding it when some journalists disclosed some of their rentals. The scandal had some cool name. I forgot what.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        4 minutes ago

        The government cannot access the information without a warrant. It does not matter if SPYco lays it all out on a public website. If they needed a warrant to track you before, they need a warrant to check for you on the public website.

        Saying the government is allowed to obliterate the 4th amendment because a private company did the hard part is just asking for government aligned corporations to gather it all up and hand it over whenever the government gives them a dollar.

    • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
      772·
      10 hours ago

      You are right. And you’re fighting against the credit reporting agencies and google, facebook, apple, and all car manufacturers for privacy rights.

      This is the result of jurists and legislators who don’t understand a single goddamned thing about computers in 2024. For fuck’s sake it’s been thirty goddamned years since this was obviously going to happen. Take a class, you bastards! Those of you who aren’t Heritage Foundation fascists.

      • bobs_monkey@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        2 hours ago

        I’m convinced that a good number of legislators understand the implications of this stuff on a cursory level, but are convinced (read: bribed) to not care on the “condition” that it doesn’t apply to them or their families. They are beholden to their constituents, and their constituents aren’t you and me, as we can’t afford them.

      • TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org
        39·
        9 hours ago

        It’s not getting better either: https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems

        There seems to have been a short window of maybe two decades in the 80s and 90s when computers and the Internet were becoming household staples where almost everyone who grew up in that time period knows what’s up, while everyone who didn’t is way more ignorant. The older folks are lost because they didn’t grow up with computers. The younger kids are lost because they were born into a world of advanced UIs, “plug and play”, and software that heavily obfuscates the nitty gritty details of how it works.

        Being forced to run command line installers, edit config.sys files, set DIP switches correctly for your front side bus speed and messing with IRQ settings for your sound card and such just to play a computer game will definitely teach you a thing or two. My family’s PC came with not only an instruction manual, but an entire language reference for the built in GW-Basic interpreter. Nowadays, you get a laptop with a small pamphlet showing you how to plug it in and turn it on.