Some of them are inherent to the technology. Cell networks that don’t track users aren’t of much use. It’s obviously not feasible for every cell tower in the world to broadcast every packet of every transmission.
Concerns about malware are trickier to answer and quickly decay to flames. Personally, I think iPhones do a decent job of keeping malware at bay. But inevitably somebody will complain that iMessage isn’t open source and the FBINSAOMGCHQ can force Apple to update my contacts with backdoored keys. What’s your threat model? Randos stealing your Facebook creds to post discount sunglasses spam and make a quick buck, or government thugs trying to crash your after work happy hour?
Who wants to know where you are and why? If the answer is “the government because they’re evil” I’d say you’re basically screwed. Go get some cups and a long string.
Yeah, even as someone who thinks a lot about different threat models to privacy, I’m going to give you this one. From a personal perspective (rather than from the perspective of designing software for others to use)… If you are ever subject to targeted surveillance, you might as well give up. For non-targeted surveillance, there are still a lot of things that can’t effectively be hidden from governments, and location is one of them.
(Edit: This does not apply if you are a journalist or intelligence-community member skeptical of your government. In those cases, the tradeoffs of avoiding easily-monitored forms of communication start to look a lot more attractive.)
It seems like with many technologies, it no longer matters if you “opt-out” completely. The people you send mails to from your super private self hosted mail server all use Google, the microphone in your friend’s phone also listen to you when it is lying on the table, Facebook has a profile of you even if you don’t have an account…
Is there a follow up article that describes common strategies to avoid these problems?
Some of them are inherent to the technology. Cell networks that don’t track users aren’t of much use. It’s obviously not feasible for every cell tower in the world to broadcast every packet of every transmission.
Concerns about malware are trickier to answer and quickly decay to flames. Personally, I think iPhones do a decent job of keeping malware at bay. But inevitably somebody will complain that iMessage isn’t open source and the FBINSAOMGCHQ can force Apple to update my contacts with backdoored keys. What’s your threat model? Randos stealing your Facebook creds to post discount sunglasses spam and make a quick buck, or government thugs trying to crash your after work happy hour?
Who wants to know where you are and why? If the answer is “the government because they’re evil” I’d say you’re basically screwed. Go get some cups and a long string.
Yeah, even as someone who thinks a lot about different threat models to privacy, I’m going to give you this one. From a personal perspective (rather than from the perspective of designing software for others to use)… If you are ever subject to targeted surveillance, you might as well give up. For non-targeted surveillance, there are still a lot of things that can’t effectively be hidden from governments, and location is one of them.
(Edit: This does not apply if you are a journalist or intelligence-community member skeptical of your government. In those cases, the tradeoffs of avoiding easily-monitored forms of communication start to look a lot more attractive.)
But using their spy satellites and drones they can zoom in on the vibrations in your string and listen to the conversation that way :D
It seems like with many technologies, it no longer matters if you “opt-out” completely. The people you send mails to from your super private self hosted mail server all use Google, the microphone in your friend’s phone also listen to you when it is lying on the table, Facebook has a profile of you even if you don’t have an account…