Google Records Everything You Say and Everything You Have Searched For — Here’s How To See Hear And Delete Your Tracking

[ramus]

27 Feb 2017 Posted by The Daily Sheeple

http://www.thelastamericanvagabond.c...lete-tracking/

The Independent has previously reported that Google’s voice search function doesn’t just turn on when specifically asked to. It records anything and everything. This has been going on for years, but the public at large became generally aware of it back in the summer of 2015.

Google also carefully keeps track of every single thing you search for on the web… all of it in one nice long history strand that makes a Facebook wall look like peanuts by comparison. Depending on whether or not you have location data on, it can also show you a timeline of where you have physically been, broken out by year on a world map.

Using these three features, Google probably knows more about you than your own mother does.

Now at least Google has set up a page in your portal which will allow you to listen to all of your recordings and view your entire history and delete it all. Just log into myactivity.google.com. While there is no “mass delete” option for everything (that’s right, you have to delete each set of searches or each recording separately), you can click on “Activity Controls” in the left-hand menu and at least choose to “pause” the features that record and store your searches, your voice recordings, etc. so Google can’t do this to you anymore in the future.

At least these features aren’t mandatory…

[TargeT]

Posted by ramus (here)
While there is no “mass delete” option for everything (that’s right, you have to delete each set of searches or each recording separately)

I just deleted everything at one time (easy) on this page: https://myactivity.google.com/delete-activity just click delete for "all time" and your good.



This will change what adds are displayed to you, but other than that shouldn't be too impactful to everyday life.

[Linderlou]

I was having a conversation on this very topic this morning. Went to google to look up voice activity, etc.... nothing there!! Yes there was a log of search activity but I tend to delete that stuff when I think of it and use other search engine.

[NeedleThreader]

Thanks for the link Target, that was super!

[Ewan]

If they're giving you the option to do that then I guess they already have the back-ups.

[Andre]

Yes, I agree they already have the backups and I suspect that our front end deletion does not delete their copy of the data. It is probably intended to make us feel better by giving us the impression we are in control.

[TargeT]

Posted by Ewan (here)
If they're giving you the option to do that then I guess they already have the back-ups.

the NSA copies it as it crosses the wire.... so, yea.

[araucaria]

There is a good deal of scaremongering about Google and other data-gathering agencies. The phone book contains most people’s phone numbers, but it is just a handy data bank that is used ethically most of the time. Government agencies possess our personal details for this and that, but check out the dead weight of red tape you encounter simply if you want say to add a line to your pension fund record. Administration tends to crumble under its own weight, so maybe the more they know about you, the less they can actually do with all that stuff. It holds for any kind of data collecting, up to and including stamp collecting, that in order to maintain any degree of quality you need a rigorous sort-and-discard policy, otherwise you will drown in a heap of useless information. The social media have become so awash with utter trivia that this may be what saves the underlying society.

Then again, to say that Google knows more about you than your mother is another scaremongering tactic for papering over the same crack. Your mother is ultimately not too interested in knowing ABOUT you, or more precisely what you are up to 24/7 (her goal, in contrast, being your independence), not nearly so interested at any rate as just knowing you, and cherishing you, and understanding how your mind works, in other words measuring the difference between anything you may say or do and who you really are. Machinery like Google precisely does not have those interpretative powers and therefore is never going to make any headway taking your words and actions literally. Google may know all about araucaria and the entity behind that screen name; but if you want to know me, you need to grapple with and understand the concepts behind a few of my posts. That means going way beyond detecting the words I use and actually understanding what I am driving at. While one is not difficult or obscure for the sake of being awkward – but rather because we are dealing with subjects that are inherently difficult and obscure – it is part of the game that humanity is heading where machine intelligence cannot follow.

The bottom line is that, both in terms of quantity and quality, the universal spying system is bound to come up short. For more on this subject, I shall later add a link to a post I am preparing right now.

[Hervé]

Google curtails the reach of one's speech but records everything one (and others) says...

How Google is recording you and storing the data

Margi Murphy The Sun, UK
Wed, 23 Aug 2017 17:47 UTC

© Sun

DID you know that Google has been recording you without your knowledge?

The technology giant has effectively turned millions of its users' smartphones into listening devices that can capture intimate conversations - even when they aren't in the room.

If you own an Android phone, it's likely that you've used Google's Assistant, which is similar to Apple's Siri.

Google says it only turns on and begins recording when you utter the words "OK Google".

But a Sun investigation has found that the virtual assistant is a little hard of hearing.

In some cases, just saying "OK" in conversation prompted it to switch on your phone and record around 20 seconds of audio.

It regularly switches on the microphone as you go about your day-to-day activities, none the wiser.

Once Google is done recording, it uploads the audio files to its computer servers - often dubbed "the cloud".

These files are accessible from absolutely anywhere in the world - as long as you have an internet connection.

That means any device that is signed into your personal Gmail or Google account can access the library of your deepest, darkest secrets.

So if you're on a laptop right now and signed into Gmail - you could have a listen.

Recordings last around 10-20 seconds on average, and a text version of the conversation is saved.

The Silicon Valley giant states on its terms and conditions that it keeps these recordings for "improving speech recognition against all Google products that use your voice".

After the Sun Online presented examples of the voice recognition flaws to Google, a spokesman said: "We only process voice searches after the phone believes the hot word 'OK Google' is detected. Audio snippets are used by Google to improve the quality of speech recognition across Search."

It recently launched a smart assistant, Google Home.

Mundane voice recordings from the general public will help its artificial intelligence that runs Google Home, by teaching it how humans naturally communicate.

In simple terms: it's a free language class for its software.

How to find out exactly what Google knows about you

First, you'll need to be signed into your Gmail or Google account.

Once you've done that, type "history.google.com/history" into your web browser.

You'll be taken to a hub which contains your entire digital footprint, so be careful, it could make for some grim reading.

This includes Maps searches and YouTube videos you've watched.

Click on "Activity Controls "on the left-hand side of the page.

Under "Web and App Activity", click "Manage Activity".

If Google's keeping tabs on you, there should be a stream of web pages and map searches that show up in chronological order.

You can randomly delete searches, or select all the searches to make them disappear.

But Google is, first and foremost, an advertising company and its largest product is a targeted advert service, which it sells to the biggest brands in the world.

Billions of annual web searches, location and email data allow it to target the population with specialised marketing - and there is no reason why it couldn't do the same with your voice data, too.

So, now for the important question: how can I listen to the sound files Google has from my life?

How can I listen back to the audio Google has recorded from my phone?

It's pretty easy.

Unlike Apple, who does not publicise any of the voice data it stores through Siri, Google is pretty transparent - giving you full access to your audio.

First, you'll need to be signed into your Gmail or Google account.

Once you've done that, type "history.google.com/history" into your web browser.

You'll be taken to a hub which contains your entire digital footprint, so be careful, it could make for some grim reading.

This includes Maps searches and YouTube videos you've watched.

Under the tab Voice and Audio Activity, you'll find a list of recordings in chronological order.

Before you start listening, you might want to plug your headphones in.

You'll have to listen to the cringe-worthy sounds of you buying a pack of fags in the newsagent or making small talk at the bus stop.

But there might also be all lots of salacious gossip that you wouldn't want anybody else to hear.

You'll be shocked to hear what it's picked up, however.

The Sun Online discovered recordings from when the phone's owner was not in the room - and even revealed a romantic interlude between two mystery colleagues.

How do I switch it off?

It is possible to stop Google from storing so much info in the future.

Go back to "Activity controls" and under "Web & App activity" you should see a blue toggle.

You can switch this off, but be warned. Officially you have merely "paused" the recordings - so keep checking back on a regular basis to ensure that the terms and conditions don't change in the future and you aren't auto-enrolled when a new Android update comes along.

Apple iPhone users aren't any better off.

The tech giant also stores your voice recordings to improve its Siri assistant - but you aren't able to access them.

Apple says that the recordings are anonymised after 18 months, so nobody would be able to figure out who is speaking.

[Hervé]

Research grants by NSA and CIA for mass surveillance is what lead to the creation of Google

Jeff Nesbit Quartz
Fri, 08 Dec 2017 16:44 UTC

© Reuters/Brian Snyder

Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google's ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.

The intelligence community hoped that the nation's leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.

The story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass-surveillance state includes elements of Google's surprising, and largely unknown, origin. It is a somewhat different creation story than the one the public has heard, and explains what Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to build, and why.

But this isn't just the origin story of Google: It's the origin story of the mass-surveillance state, and the government money that funded it.

Backstory: The intelligence community and Silicon Valley
In the mid 1990s, the intelligence community in America began to realize that they had an opportunity. The supercomputing community was just beginning to migrate from university settings into the private sector, led by investments from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley.

The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley's efforts at their inception so they would be useful for homeland security purposes. A digital revolution was underway: one that would transform the world of data gathering and how we make sense of massive amounts of information. The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley's supercomputing efforts at their inception so they would be useful for both military and homeland security purposes. Could this supercomputing network, which would become capable of storing terabytes of information, make intelligent sense of the digital trail that human beings leave behind?

Answering this question was of great interest to the intelligence community.

Intelligence-gathering may have been their world, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) had come to realize that their future was likely to be profoundly shaped outside the government. It was at a time when military and intelligence budgets within the Clinton administration were in jeopardy, and the private sector had vast resources at their disposal. If the intelligence community wanted to conduct mass surveillance for national security purposes, it would require cooperation between the government and the emerging supercomputing companies.

To do this, they began reaching out to the scientists at American universities who were creating this supercomputing revolution. These scientists were developing ways to do what no single group of human beings sitting at work stations in the NSA and the CIA could ever hope to do: gather huge amounts of data and make intelligent sense of it.

A rich history of the government's science funding
There was already a long history of collaboration between America's best scientists and the intelligence community, from the creation of the atomic bomb and satellite technology to efforts to put a man on the moon.

The internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort. In fact, the internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort: In the 1970s, the agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for military, intelligence, and national security purposes-the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-linked four supercomputers to handle massive data transfers. It handed the operations off to the National Science Foundation (NSF) a decade or so later, which proliferated the network across thousands of universities and, eventually, the public, thus creating the architecture and scaffolding of the World Wide Web.

Silicon Valley was no different. By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.

They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.

The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project
MDDS was introduced to several dozen leading computer scientists at Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and others in a white paper that described what the CIA, NSA, DARPA, and other agencies hoped to achieve. The research would largely be funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF, which would allow the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector if it managed to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.

"Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data," the intelligence community said in its 1993 MDDS white paper. "Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions."

Over the next few years, the program's stated aim was to provide more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept. The grants were to be directed largely through the NSF so that the most promising, successful efforts could be captured as intellectual property and form the basis of companies attracting investments from Silicon Valley. This type of public-to-private innovation system helped launch powerful science and technology companies like Qualcomm, Symantec, Netscape, and others, and funded the pivotal research in areas like Doppler radar and fiber optics, which are central to large companies like AccuWeather, Verizon, and AT&T today. Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research.

The CIA and NSA's end goal
The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called "birds of a feather:" Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the "birds of a feather" briefing, and the "Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems" took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the "birds of a feather" briefing. Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could "birds of a feather" be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?

By working with emerging commercial-data companies, their intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the internet and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind, much like forensic scientists use fingerprint smudges to identify criminals. Just as "birds of a feather flock together," they predicted that potential terrorists would communicate with each other in this new global, connected world-and they could find them by identifying patterns in this massive amount of new information. Once these groups were identified, they could then follow their digital trails everywhere.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, computer-science boy wonders
In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was "query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the 'query flocks' approach." A second grant-the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google's origin-was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?

This process is perfectly suited for the purposes of counter-terrorism and homeland security efforts: Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found Brin's and Page's research efforts so appealing; prior to this time, the CIA largely used human intelligence efforts in the field to identify people and groups that might pose threats. The ability to track them virtually (in conjunction with efforts in the field) would change everything.

It was the beginning of what in just a few years' time would become Google. The two intelligence-community managers charged with leading the program met regularly with Brin as his research progressed, and he was an author on several other research papers that resulted from this MDDS grant before he and Page left to form Google.

The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn't work for the intelligence community-or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.

Left out of Google's story
The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google's origin story, even though the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: "Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant," he wrote. In a published research paper that includes some of Brin's pivotal work, the authors also reference the NSF grant that was created by the MDDS program.

Instead, every Google creation story only mentions just one federal grant: the NSF/DARPA "digital libraries" grant, which was designed to allow Stanford researchers to search the entire World Wide Web stored on the university's servers at the time. "The development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford," Stanford's Infolab says of its origin, for example. NSF likewise only references the digital libraries grant, not the MDDS grant as well, in its own history of Google's origin. In the famous research paper, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," which describes the creation of Google, Brin and Page thanked the NSF and DARPA for its digital library grant to Stanford. But the grant from the intelligence community's MDDS program-specifically designed for the breakthrough that Google was built upon-has faded into obscurity.

Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, "The statements related to Google are completely untrue."

Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.

To understand this significance, you have to consider what the intelligence community was trying to achieve as it seeded grants to the best computer-science minds in academia: The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur the development of something that looks almost exactly like Google. Brin's breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and linking them to the many searches conducted-essentially identifying "birds of a feather"-was largely the aim of the intelligence community's MDDS program. And Google succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

The intelligence community's enduring legacy within Silicon Valley
Digital privacy concerns over the intersection between the intelligence community and commercial technology giants have grown in recent years. But most people still don't understand the degree to which the intelligence community relies on the world's biggest science and tech companies for its counter-terrorism and national-security work.

Civil-liberty advocacy groups have aired their privacy concerns for years, especially as they now relate to the Patriot Act. "Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet," says the ACLU. "While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects."

When asked, the biggest technology and communications companies-from Verizon and AT&T to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft-say that they never deliberately and proactively offer up their vast databases on their customers to federal security and law enforcement agencies: They say that they only respond to subpoenas or requests that are filed properly under the terms of the Patriot Act.

But even a cursory glance through recent public records shows that there is a treadmill of constant requests that could undermine the intent behind this privacy promise. According to the data-request records that the companies make available to the public, in the most recent reporting period between 2016 and 2017, local, state and federal government authorities seeking information related to national security, counter-terrorism or criminal concerns issued more than 260,000 subpoenas, court orders, warrants, and other legal requests to Verizon, more than 250,000 such requests to AT&T, and nearly 24,000 subpoenas, search warrants, or court orders to Google. Direct national security or counter-terrorism requests are a small fraction of this overall group of requests, but the Patriot Act legal process has now become so routinized that the companies each have a group of employees who simply take care of the stream of requests.

In this way, the collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn - and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.

[Hervé]

From Jim Stone:

Chrome will soon block virtualy all ads to web sites Google does not like

They claim only types of ads that will work will be ones like for the gun company (above) but I'd be willing to bet that they are going to have people scouring the web looking for totally benign ads like that one and banning them on an individual basis. and I would bet even that ad does not work now. It probably goes to a mirror. The ad above is only an animated gif with a link.

PREDICTION:
Since we all know from past behavior that Google's only intent is to destroy alt media, totally harmless picture ads will definitely be banned, but they won't admit to that yet.

To accomplish this they will launch an AI to scour sites like this one, looking for pictures that are links and then simply not letting them load.

It will also evolve to looking for pictures that have text associated with them or embedded in them, so you can't use any form of advertising whatsoever.

They are not announcing that yet, but they will. Just give them a few years to drop their acid.

Here is what the upcoming Google ad ban means right now, this February:
If you managed to get ads from a secondary provider after Google banned you from adsense (what Google does to sites that tell the truth,) Google will now ban your new ad provider and de-fund you that way.

IF YOU WANT YOUR ADS TO WORK, YOU HAVE TO PAY GOOGLE TO LET THEM WORK via a third party shell organization they set up.

This also applies to sites like Infowars, which sells it's own products, and issues the ads for those products from it's own server. If Google does not want them to show up on your site, they won't.

They are not saying how much they are going to extort people for (to allow the ads to load) yet but there is no question it is going to be deadly, if not now, in the future.

This may seem like I am sensationalizing things, but I am not.

All one has to do is look at Google's past behavior.

• First they banned people from adsense.

• Now they are banning many "ad types" for people who have figured out how to make it without adsense (unless, of course, adsense itself sends that ad type).

Those two steps are confirmed.

The only step remaining will be to ban all ads google does not approve of, PERIOD, no matter how they are done. And if they can have an AI learn chess better than any grand master in hours, you can bet they can have that AI automatically wipe out all forms of revenue to any web site.

BY DENYING AD REVENUE THE WAY GOOGLE HAS, THEY ARE COMMITTING ACTS OF WAR THAT HAVE DIRECT POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES. IT IS THE NEW COLD WAR, AND IF IT DOES NOT BECOME A HOT ONE, WE ARE GOING TO GET CRUSHED. They are begging for problems.


To see a whitewash on this topic click here. Yes, I don't like the ad types they specifically mention, but there are 4 other ad types they do not mention that will also be blocked. Anyone with an ounce of wit ought to know what this is really about.

[Ewan]

Jim Stone mentions Feb in that article, an update followed linking a document that appears to be dated Dec 18, 2017.

UPDATE TO THE ABOVE:
ACCORDING TO THIS DOCUMENT, IF YOU DO NOT "VOLUNTARILY" PAY YOUR EXTORTION MONEY OR MEET "STANDARDS" THEY DO NOT MENTION, ALL ADS OF ALL TYPES WILL BE BLOCKED ON YOUR SITE EVEN IF YOU ISSUE THEM YOURSELF.
From that document, which is an example of perfection in "leave out all relevant details" legal sleaze, they are simply going to force people to "volunarily" get their web sites certified by a central agency and if they do not, all ads of any form will be banned on it by their browser or whatever other technology is available to make it happen. I was right in my original statement above - this is a political move where a central panel will decide what sites live and what sites do not.

[Hervé]

From Jim Stone (scroll down):

11 Jan 2018

UNBELIEVABLE: GOOGLE TAKES INVASIVENESS TO AN ENTIRELY NEW LEVEL

I just got an Android smart phone (an inexpensive one) for $45 at Wal Mart. If you do not let google record everything full time, AND record video full time, AND take pictures of your environment whenever it wants, AND have full access to all your contacts, AND have full time tracking of your location, it will partially brick the phone, including all web browsing and SMS.

I am not mistaken. The phone is an ST Origins with Android 6.0, quad core with GPS and everything else a smart phone has. It is not performance compromised. It is not a performance issue. When you start the browser, it has a list of options, which are:

Allow Google to track your location? yes/no

Allow Google to access your camera? yes/no

Allow Google to access your contacts? Yes/no

Allow Google to record audio? Yes/no

Allow Google to access your personal files? Yes/no

Allow Google to make and "manage" phone calls? Yes/no

If you enable ALL OF THEM, you can surf the web and receive text messages.

But if you disable a SINGLE ONE, and you try to open the browser, it says it is blocked by your privacy settings and will instantly close. I **** YOU NOT.

Google also demands that every single file on the phone be recorded to it's "online backup" as soon as it is made, or it will brick the phone.

Let's face it. If it is a smartphone, and it can't go online or receive text messages, it is AS GOOD AS BRICKED.

WTF is Google thinking with this BULL****??!!??

See picture http://82.221.129.208/****yougoogle.jpg at Jim Stone's site

[East Sun]

My middle finger to google, and twitter and all the electronic ah's
on the internet.

And also anything that calls itself SMART which it it not.

i don't use their crapolla, period. i boycott them. if you are wise and intelligent,
which they are not, you should not imo, use them. ignore them totally.
that's my advice.

[sunwings]

PLEASE TAKE 5 MINUTES TO WATCH THIS VIDEO

A journalist intercepts the metadata your phone sends back to google after a day of walking around a city.

Every step you make, every turn you take, I will be watching you.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YxY148GiyaU

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by sunwings (here)
PLEASE TAKE 5 MINUTES TO WATCH THIS VIDEO

A journalist intercepts the metadata your phone sends back to google after a day of walking around a city.

Every step you make, every turn you take, I will be watching you.

Jim Sinclair just posted this same video, minus the Fox News cover, on his website, at George Orwell’s 1984 is our reality. (jsmineset.com).

VIDEO

https://www.jsmineset.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Google.mp4

I conclude that if a phone's battery is inserted (*) and works, then your smartphone will track your movements and locations, and upload that activity to Google, the next time it is connected, by any means available, the next time that it can.

(*) Of course, most decent and recent smartphones don't allow you to remove the battery, so they are "always on", so long as the battery is not drained down to being empty.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by sunwings (here)
PLEASE TAKE 5 MINUTES TO WATCH THIS VIDEO
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YxY148GiyaU

Yes, please do.

[Hervé]

From Jim Stone:

Big glass microphone

Using a fiber optic network for computer communications to track you with the vibrations you make

Stanford University did an experiment with it's fiber optic internet and network lines, to see if mundane vibrations made by people walking, cyclists, cars, and more could be used to track people, and the answer was a resounding YES.

Fiber optic lines use light to transmit data, and any movement of those lines will modulate the intensity of the light received on the other end of the line. Researchers at Stanford discovered that the effect was so sensitive that they could track where people walked, just by following the disturbances caused by the vibrations they made to the light within the fiber optic lines of the computer network.

From The atlantic:

"Intended as a benign revelation of the kinds of data everyday infrastructure is already capturing, Big Glass Microphone inadvertently suggests a new way for agents of political control to monitor the city. Activists might do everything in their power to avoid CCTV, to fool facial-recognition algorithms, even to thermally camouflage themselves to thwart night-vision cameras-but the seismic signatures produced while walking from activist apartment to secret meeting place interacting with fiber optic internet cables will ultimately betray them as they induce micro vibrations into the lines. This gives a whole new meaning to the idea of following someone's every footstep."

The story that had this information was posted by The Atlantic, which is obviously trying to compete with alt media by publishing this.

=======================================

Now, that's a filtering feat!