https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687
It's unclear whether this is enough to prevent a geofence warrant from sweeping up your data.
For additional security, an Android user can stop using Google Play Services for geolocation. This can be done by disabling Google Play Services or switching to an Android distribution without Play Services, at the cost of slowing down the process of getting a location lock (since Play Services uses Wi-Fi and cell tower trilateration to accelerate this).
Another solution is to replace Play Services with microG, which allows you to use a selection of non-Google location providers for trilateration, including ones that work fully offline. Android distributions that pre-install microG include CalyxOS, LineageOS for microG, and /e/. Alternatively, DivestOS includes the location module of microG (UnifiedNlp) but not the other parts.
If a government body wanted to know where you were - always, they would need to send a team to watch you.
This could be made much easier by recruiting a coworker or two, a neighbor or two, to keep an eye out if you did something other than what was expected.
Informants help scale the system.
If they wanted to know who you were contacting, they would need someone to tap your phone (in one way or another).
Your mail is easily intercepted and checked.
All of it would consume resource that were not endless. There were limits on how many people Stasi could watch at the same time, even with informers.
Now, nearly all of this can be done without any human resources being spent and truly little cost overall. It even worse retroactively. Where were you two years ago in December 12?
That would be hard to figure out for even a nation state in 1930. (Unless you were already being watched).
Now it is trivial.
It is available to the US, and all Western nations, as well as most nations at a certain technological level.
The US uses fragments of it to kill people on a regular basis. Without any bothersome judicial oversight.
I keep thinking that Stasi leaders would have continues orgasms if they had access to the tools that are available for a nation state now.
This not a good faith analysis. Probable cause to make an arrest of a suspect is different for probable cause of a search.
Only the former requires probable cause to believe that a crime was committed and that the person in question committed it.
Probable cause for a search means probable cause to believe a crime was committed and that the area to be searched contains relevant evidence. It is the question of whether "there is a fair probability that contraband or evidence of a crime will be found in a particular place." Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213, 214 (1983).
If there was a murder in your neighborhood and your neighbor saw a random person digging a large hole in your back yard and putting a body bag in it, there would be probable cause to search your property without regard to whether you yourself were implicated as a suspect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266650 (23 Aug 2021)
I once had a tech lead insist we take everything out of the cloud, and do it on our own bare metal.
People thought he was insane. But he did the math again and again: faster and cheaper.
Turned out really, really well.
Even in personal computing … do we really need the cloud for everything?
The problem is that for many dev's who've been inculcated their entire careers with the mantra "cloud first" getting them to a point where they can accurately make an educated choice takes time.
Or to put it another way, the pendulum is currently swung way over towards "cloud everything".
I'm older than I suspect the average age is on here so I've lived in the "pre-cloud" and "cloud" world and can see the benefits (and drawbacks) of both.
The irony is that much of the work done to make things work in the cloud is directly applicable to running similar workloads on your own hardware if you want to (docker, things like minio as a random example) hell even Kubernetes.
Is this not exactly what I just described as the problem? Governments ruining the ability to hold data safely in online locations? "Stop being an online services company" does not seem like a solution. Being able to provide online services & networks seems to power a vast amount of modernity.
A lot of downvotes on my post. But holy shit I have no idea how anyone can see this as anything else. The discussion seems ridiculously off target. The government is making the data-center untrustable: how is this at all debateable? How is this any better than the Chinese authoritarianism that plagues their intranet? In neither world are people free to think or communicate. This is obvious.
It's like saying "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply for serious accusations.
I never use my mobile phone, except rarely. Unfortunately, having a phone is becoming 100% mandatory. One cannot get financial services, for example, without a mobile phone. The companies will not accept you as a client. If I could get away with not having a mobile phone, I would never buy one. So I broke down and bought the least expensive mobile phone that I could a few months ago, paid the cheapest plan ($15/month), and keep it for those singular occasions where I need it. I need it maybe once every few months, and have to pay $50 for the phone, and $180 per year for the phone plan. Just to use it a few times a year.
Anyways, if you don't want to be tracked everywhere, get a Faraday bag and keep your phone in it all the time, except when you use it.
