404 Media, along with Haaretz, Notus, and Krebs On Security recently reported on a company that captures smartphone location data from a variety of sources and collates that data into an easy-to-use tool to track devices’ (and, by proxy, individuals’) locations. The dangers that this tool presents are especially grave for those traveling to or from out-of-state reproductive health clinics, places of worship, and the border.
The tool, called Locate X, is run by a company called Babel Street. Locate X is designed for law enforcement, but an investigator working with Atlas Privacy, a data removal service, was able to gain access to Locate X by simply asserting that they planned to work with law enforcement in the future.
With an incoming administration adversarial to those most at risk from location tracking using tools like Locate X, the time is ripe to bolster our digital defenses. Now more than ever, attorneys general in states hostile to reproductive choice will be emboldened to use every tool at their disposal to incriminate those exerting their bodily autonomy. Locate X is a powerful tool they can use to do this. So here are some timely tips to help protect your location privacy.
For the past 20 years I’ve been saying to people who wouldn’t listen, we need to make sure all this new technology works FOR us, and not AGAINST us.
I’m a firm believer in spectrums. And I firmly believe that every possible eventuality on a spectrum of outcomes has an equal chance of happening. The only controling factors are the variables which dictate a set of events.
What this means is just because people do things one way, and have always done things one way, doesn’t mean they always will do things one way.
Basically, we have an equal chance of adolph hitler coming back from the dead, as we do jesus coming back from the dead. Those two events have equal likelyhood. And everything in between is also fair game.
So when I was saying in the early 2000s, that given the right tools, and the wrong authority, the internet could be used as a privacy invasion tool to spy on all americans. No one cared.
Then in 2012, when the whole Edward Snowden thing came out, I thought “Ok. This will be the thing to get Americans angry, and demand transparency from their governmemt. They’ll begin to place importance on privacy.”
Nope. They STILL didn’t care. My mom still thinks I made up the whole concept of the NSA. Not the concept of the NSA spying on us. She thinks I made of the core concept of what the NSA is. And when I asked her at the time if I made up the NSA, then who is Edward Snowden, and what did he do?"
Her response was “Someone you made up too.” When I asked her how he’s in the news if I made him up, she said “I never heard him on the news.”
That was when I knew it was pointless. There was nothing stopping the government from spying on us, and as I’d see years later, nothing stopping cops from abusing power.
So now I know, for every George Floyd who makes the news, theres 1000 more that don’t, whose cops go unchecked. And the publics response is indifference, because it didn’t affect them.
And now this.
WE will read this story. It WILL be used against people. It won’t make the news. There will be no outrage. Then one day, your daughter may have an unplanned pregnancy. I’m not even going to go full hysteria and say rape baby. I’m saying your daughter will have stupid sex, with no condom, regardless of age, 14, 28, doesn’t matter. What matters is she’s pregnant, and it will ruin her life.
So now she goes out of state, and gets an abortion. Then she’s arrested because they tracked her. NOW it affects you. Now your daughter is doing 20 years in jail for “murder”.
And the only way this stops, is something that will never happen. The way to end this, is for women to give birth to the baby, then kill 3 men, then kill the baby on the steps of their states capitol in a way that’s very violent. Blood everywhere. It needs to capture the news attention. Then kills herself. THEN that needs to be a trend. For the anti-abortion law existing to not only reduce population, but punishes men specifically. And then cause emotional outrage among women for having to see dead baby blood on the capitol daily.
But that won’t happen. It won’t happen because even me typing that is going to anger the majority of you. It may even get my post deleted. But that same sense of being offended is exactly the mentality that will get it to stop.
Instead, everyone will ignore everyone elses problems, until it becomes their problems. Everybody wants a safe space, but nobody is willing to fight for it…and that’s exactly what they use against us to pass bills that control us. Knowing the fight just won’t materialize. And until some drastic extreme fight is brought to their doorstep, they’ll just keep going.