Find your Device with an SMS or online with the help of FMDServer. This applications goal is to track your device when it’s lost and should be a…
Find your Device with an SMS or online with the help of FMDServer. This applications goal is to track your device when it’s lost and should be a…
Took a bit to figure out what it was even claiming to do
God no. Just take a hatchet to my battery and be done with it.
Also: Until a month or two ago, sure. But google finally got their shit together-ish and set up a tracking network the same as apple and samsung. And that is what you are sacrificing your privacy for. Yes, you give Big Tech tracking information… that they already have. In exchange you can actually have peace of mind of knowing your luggage is in the same airport or even where you parked. And you can’t really self-host a crowd-sourced network.
You’d be surprised what little impact on battery it actually has. I find this type of swift casting aside of something you’ve not even tried to be rather disingenuous.
Also, if your device has a cellular modem with an active connection, your provider is already tracking your location constantly and selling your personal information to the highest bidder anyways (including law enforcement and governments), so IMO it’s a bit pointless to worry so much about that.
They can have data about your past but if you care about privacy, you can limit data collection a lot and outdated data is useless in many cases. Sacrificing privacy is a questionable choice and won’t give a conscious person peace of mind at all lol but everyone makes their own decisions.
If people truly change their lives and focus on it, you can do a lot. But it does not take much, at all, to become compromised to one degree or another and people vastly underestimate the amount of redundancy. Or even the impact of a sibling or partner or even friend.
Instead, the common case is people will tweak one small aspect and think that does anything other than inconvenience them. Or, worse, they’ll watch a youtube and decide to put EVERYTHING through their vpn which… defeats the purpose because they are still one easily collated set of profiles/cookies that can trivially reveal that “Fred Smith in Afghanistan” is really “Fred Smith in North Carolina”
Which is why my approach is that there is data I very much want to protect and data I know I can’t. So I focus on understanding the former while doing what I can with the latter.
And something like this? There are probably specific niche use cases for this. But it is a product/service that fundamentally requires aggregated data. And, depending on the implementation, it is going to fuck with your battery hard.
TL;DR You need a realistic threat model.
Well that’s true but ehh still it doesn’t happen too often. If you want to keep your data away from the government then it is a danger. If you just want not to give the unethical advertising and data mining companies your data for free so they don’t have profit (like I do), you don’t need to focus that much. And if you’re concerned about your partners and friends getting the data, you have to reconsider their role in your life ngl.
That’s why you get a separate identity or device for everything that requires your real name and NEVER EVER tell your real name online (they even teach it in schools nowadays if you didn’t know).
If you want a public life with posting everything that happens to you, you can’t protect much except the metadata. Other than that there is some data you can’t protect but my previous points help with it and, once again, it depends on who you want to protect it from.
GPS ftw.
If you have an active cellular connection, you cannot really limit data collection, including the tracking and selling of your location data.
GPS on a secure device is the answer. Also read my long explanation. I recommend using 2 devices and identities to avoid similar issues
Assuming by secure device you mean one with a removable battery or no cellular modem at all.
That’s really overkill for my threat model. For me it’s a device with a degoogled FOSS ROM, no proprietary software, no sim card and with correct settings
Don’t know about you but Google sure as shit is not tracking my location.
If you think google and your provider don’t already have your location… lol. lmao even
LMAO they absolutely don’t, you dolt.
How does googles network work I assumed every phone know its own location and can relay location of nearby devices combined with multiple devices and some triangulation and maybe WiFi ssid tracking u can locate almost anything. Now that raises the major concern mainly google will know the location of every single device I’m sure its doing Bluetooth scanning so I doubt even I on graphene will be getting tracked. Surly there is a better decentralised anonymous solution here.
Not sure if google is particularly different but the way this works for the other services is basically low energy bluetooth scanning coupled with the phones providing their location*. So basically all the devices on that scanning/spy network periodically ping/listen for nearby devices/trackers. When it finds one, it sends a quick message to the servers with that phone’s location and the ID of the tracker. Get enough of those pings and you can triangulate the position of the tracker pretty precisely.
Which… is why this fundamentally does not work with “hacker” solutions that allegedly emphasize privacy. Because you just don’t have enough devices listening. This was painfully obvious with tile back in the day and is still an issue with Samsung in some countries.
*: Via a combination of gps, cell tower, and wifi network scanning. The less obvious part of that being wifi networks which is the majority of how interior positioning works.