EFF Guide to Street Level Surveillance

https://www.eff.org/sls

by aestetix • 11 years ago

166 26 11 years ago

This is such a great opportunity. I hope they can expand the content to include information like 1) where should I look for it and 2) what do I do when I encounter it. This could help bring the general concerns out of that's-so-tinfoil territory and make the content more shareable with the general public.

cronjobber• 11 years ago

To make your analogy more precise, the article is in that's-so-mind-control-rays territory. Your proposed addition would be, "wear a tinfoil hat!"

idle_processor• 11 years ago

Not necessarily.

The "tinfoil hat" approach is a personal-scope solution.

Part of the "what do I do when I encounter it" course of action could involve a societal-scope solution. E.g., getting involved with privacy advocacy groups or pressuring relevant lawmakers to roll overreach back. (This is, admittedly, far more work and far less likely to succeed.)

flashman3• 11 years ago

I would like to see them cover Bluetooth and 802.11-based tracking. Most people I've talked to are unaware that their wifi device periodically sends out probe requests containing its unique MAC address (some more frequently than others, in my testing), which can be used to correlate your location and build a profile.

It's not even difficult, I set up a Raspberry Pi to do it and graphed the arrival and departure times of individual workers in my office. There are businesses putting tracking across a constellation of retail partners, then selling the partners information about what other stores their customers visited.

And yes, I'm aware that iOS 8 is supposed to randomize your MAC address to guard against this (cynically I'd say it helps them push iBeacons) but as of September 2014, it wasn't really working as you'd expect: http://www.imore.com/closer-look-ios-8s-mac-randomization

cconcepts2• 11 years ago

Do you have any info on the raspberry pi graphing arrival/departure times?

flashman3• 11 years ago

We mostly followed http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/3817/ which relies on https://github.com/IMAmuseum/visitorflow. I don't remember a great deal about it as it was a prototype that never got turned into anything else.

mike-cardwell3• 11 years ago

Did your employees know you were tracking them in this manner? Seems pretty creepy to me...

bumbledraven3• 11 years ago

OP didn't say they were his employees.

vanous• 11 years ago

If you have electronic device on you, you are leaving a trail behind, like footsteps. Is it creepy or illegal to follow or collect those [footsteps]? I telecommute (* ) and easily check if people are in or not by pinging their computers (you may check for visibility of samba shares) - they have no expectation of me knowing they are in or not, but by no means i see this less creepy then your instant messenger of choice showing you as online and me checking. It is increasingly becoming bigger and bigger responsibility of ours to stop leaving these traces behind.

* i have never been told, but can easily imagine my VPN connection logs (server side) can be checked for when i logged in/out (not that they could even imagine i get in also via ssh/port forward through another box, when the VPN is down due to admin negligence) so i have no expectation of privacy there either.

liotier• 11 years ago

I recommend the Wi-Fi Privacy Police, a.k.a Pry-Fi : https://github.com/BramBonne/privacypolice

imglorp• 11 years ago

Don't forget EZ-Pass. There are readers on various major roads around here, not in a toll capacity. I think they're used by state DOT to assess traffic flow.

Eg: http://www.autoblog.com/2011/06/27/e-zpass-privacy-invasion/

and: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/09/12/e-zpasses...

slxh• 11 years ago

Don't forget the RFID tags in your car wheels (TPMS and probably tires): http://www.computerworld.com/article/2519983/data-privacy/ti...

geophile• 11 years ago

The first article says that you don't have to use EZPass if you are concerned about privacy, and the eventual automation of speeding tickets. That won't be true forever. I've run into some tolls that are EZPass ONLY. Some of them read your license plate and send you a bill if you don't have EZPass. And here in Massachusetts, on the Mass Pike, if you don't use EZPass, you will be penalized when you get your bill for road usage. The justification is that scanning your plate and then finding your address costs the government more money.

njharman• 11 years ago

by Street Level I hoped they meant "tails", direct (camera, video, shotgun mike), that kind of thing.

zmanian• 11 years ago

There are an emerging set of strategies at the local level for mitigating street level surveillance.

It consists of watching your city council agenda for consent to purchase new surveillance technology via Department of Homeland Security grant.

Use this occasion to push for a privacy policy that governs the new equipment as a condition of purchase.

Restore the Fourth SF Bay Area, Oakland Privacy et al are seeing a pattern emerge where the purchase is either delayed or the privacy policy is adopted.

It's often possible to sign up for email alerts of the agenda for city council meetings.

EFF Guide to Street Level Surveillance

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