"During our security research we found that smart phones with Qualcomm chip secretly send personal data to Qualcomm. This data is sent without user consent, unencrypted, and even when using a Google-free Android distribution."
California Court of appeal has held that geofence warrants are unconstitutional
For those who don't know, a Geofence warrant, instead of targeting an individual or location like a traditional warrant, forces a carrier such as google or T-Mobile or some other entity to turn over data from ALL users/devices in a given radius.
This is a great series of articles by security researcher Mike Kuketz that documents the data transmission behavior of popular web browsers on their default settings, examining the type of connections they make and what data they "phone home" with:
Smartphones using the Snapdragon 630 chip were found to call home to Qualcomm without the consent of the user, bypassing the whole operating system. Data includes unique hardware ID, current IP, country, your ISP, list of installed apps and other data.
However, back then it was the a java process on OS level that requested the data, not the firmware.
Should it be true that Qualcomm, instead of fixing the issue properly, simply moved it to a lower level (as @nitrokey implies) this could be huge. Perhaps @kuketzblog is better at analyzing this than me. #privacy#security#android#qualcomm
g10 Code becomes a KDE patron🎉! g10 Code are the creators and maintainers of #GnuPG, the vital #encryption engine 🔒 that is one of the fundamental technologies that ensures #privacy 🔑 and #security online.
“As the BBC's QI revealed, ticking the little box is actually letting the site check things like your internet browsing history to determine whether you're a real person or not.
"Ticking the box is not the point. It's how you behaved before you ticked the box that is analysed," Sandi Toksvig explained to the panel.”
LineageOS hinterlässt weder einen datenschutzfreundlichen, noch wirklich sicheren Eindruck. Es unternimmt keine besonderen Anstrengungen, um sich von Google abzunabeln. Fairerweise muss man aber auch erwähnen: Das haben sie nie behauptet. 👇
"The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and advertisements we each see, but also the prices we’re offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals..."
"In his excellent book on #surveillance, Bruce Schneier has pointed out we would never agree to carry tracking devices and report all our most intimate conversations if the government made us do it.
But under such a scheme, we would enjoy more legal protections than we have now. By letting ourselves be tracked voluntarily, we forfeit all protection against how that information is used.
Those who control the data gain enormous power over those who don't."
Audon is a great real-time audio streaming service for the #fediverse! Think Spaces or Clubhouse, and you pretty much got it. You create a room for audio, where other people can listen to you, or just give them the role of speaker as well.
You can easily log in with your fediverse (Mastodon/Calckey/Pleroma) account, create a room, share the link, and you're ready to go!