Yeah its entirely expected. Its a global trend and its not gonna stop.

HW backdoors are probably not something that brokers like these leverage so its a different topic. They just like making easy money from ad tracking systems, they dont wanna work hard and fuck around with zero days.

If you have physical security worries (government trying to kill you) then you either need graphene on a pixel and hope there are no RCE HW backdoors or something else entirely or no phone.

But the “tracking by default” in normal phones, with data being easily available is an issue that affects almost everyone not just high risk individuals.

Found it (In german but we have translators these days…) https://netzpolitik.org/2024/databroker-files-firma-verschleudert-36-milliarden-standorte-von-menschen-in-deutschland/

This is about phone location data, but i dont see any reason why cars would be any different, they create less privacy sensitive data than phones in a way.

The people that wrote this article actually got a huge amount of slightly older data for free just as a sample. But this is the scale these data brokers operate at:

The data itself comes from the US company Datastream Group. It offers such location data on a monthly subscription basis. According to the offer, it comes from up to 163 countries and is updated hourly.

You can buy huge amounts of location data for anyone anywhere that uses a standard google or apple phone. Im not sure if you even need to have some random app, like socials or anything with ads in it, installed that leaks this data or if its just google and apple themselves that sell it. All you need is a single identifying point of confirmed time+location for your target and then you can reconstruct their entire movement from that.

This has very obvious and less obvious horrible implications. Things like tracking victims of abuse, finding out peoples home address after meeting them once, tracking military personnel movement, tracking people going to sex related locations, prisons, abortion clinics, endless potential for abuse.

claim to be a private investigator or something

Oh no absolutely not necessary, this is commercially for sale data that anyone can buy as long as you dont make it obvious that you are up to no good. I will see if i can find the last article i saw about someone testing this themselves.

Good function will usually result into nice form anyways. Like old thinkpads for example.

Enjoy this wonderful Posy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjKjZwd_KY0

You go to a data broker that sells “anonymized” location data and give them money and a region of interest. Done.

It shouldnt just be called a privacy risk. Its a safety risk because it enables stalking with little to zero effort on the stalkers side.

Chinese apparently actually

If you execute random, non media file formats that u got from a torrent then thats on you.

Thats an advantage so thin it is almost invisible. Its a centralized platform, it could be bought by Elon or shutdown for whatever reason at any second. Being this shortsighted about the future of global communications systems is not a great idea when Trump is about to take office.

No, and it doesnt federate even though they promised that a long time ago. Unless they do, they will inevitably also go to shit, there is no way around the enshittification pipeline. Just stick to mastodon and invest in a long term future.

For a slightly more detailed explanation: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

K9 mail is all i have ever wanted in a mobile email client. Supports e2ee plugins too.

Mozilla has bigger issue imo. They should focus on maintaining, fixing and improving their existing core products instead of trying to cover everything.