When you sleep your iPhone is programmed to send your private and personal info

(illustration: popular apps contain hidden trackers)

Annually surveillance of the mass population is a multibillion dollar industry, where is it wrapped up under so called advertising or hidden by governments under multi layered shelf corporations.

The push for smartphones and most importantly apps is enormous by governments and corporations alike, as these devices put data syphoning outside of the user's control.

Apps can and do contain 'malicious' code which extracts user data and sends it wherever the programmer has decided to send the data without the user's knowledge and most importantly without consent.

Websites on the other hand can be more easily scrutinised as to where the programmer sends the 'consumer's' (more accurate terms: data generator, corporate slave) data, but the policy is not to program, websites but rather provide apps for them.

Do you really need to read a Rupert Murdoch news site via an app, where the web address will suffice?

The Bank of Melbourne created a smartphone app, which in reality opened up a web browser on the user's smartphone in reality making that app totally useless and an unnecessary cost to the bank's customers.

See link: https://corpau.blogspot.com/2016/10/australians-like-lambs-to-slaughter.html

Realistically apps are detrimental to your online privacy and your personal data.

Please note that even though today there are encryption programs available for communications purposes, mobile phone technology given to the masses was (deliberately) designed not to be private nor secure.

We do not recommend the purchase or use of Apple products.

Did you pay, over 2k, for them to spy on you ??? !!! ??? (PMSL)

See the topic called Surveillance Self-Defence by the Electronic Frontier Foundation at:

https://ssd.eff.org/en

See article from 29 May 2019 by The Sydney Morning Herald of the headline:

Do you know who your iPhone talks to when you're sleeping?

 It's 3am. Do you know what your iPhone is doing?

Mine has been alarmingly busy. Even though the screen is off and I'm snoring, apps are beaming out lots of information about me to companies I've never heard of. Your iPhone probably is doing the same; and Apple could be doing more to stop it.

 When you think your iPhone's resting, you might actually be incredibly busy.

On a recent Monday night, a dozen marketing companies, research firms and other personal data guzzlers got reports from my iPhone. At 11.43pm, a company called Amplitude learned my phone number, email and exact location. At 3.58am, another called Appboy got a digital fingerprint of my phone. At 6.25am, a tracker called Demdex received a way to identify my phone and sent back a list of other trackers to pair up with.

Our data has a secret life in many of the devices we use every day, from talking smart speakers to smart TVs. But we've got a giant blind spot when it comes to the data companies probing our phones.

You might assume you can count on Apple to sweat all the privacy details. After all, it touted in a recent ad, "What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone." My investigation suggests otherwise.

iPhone apps I discovered tracking me by passing information to third parties — just while I was asleep — include Microsoft OneDrive, Intuit's Mint, Nike, Spotify, Yelp, The Washington Post and IBM's The Weather Channel. One app, the crime-alert service Citizen, shared personally identifiable information in violation of its published privacy policy.

And your iPhone doesn't feed data trackers only while you sleep. In a single week, I encountered over 5400 trackers, mostly in apps. According to US privacy firm Disconnect, which helped test my iPhone, those unwanted trackers would have spewed out 1.5 gigabytes of data over the span of a month.

"This is your data, why should it even leave your phone? Why should it be collected by someone when you don't know what they're going to do with it?" says Patrick Jackson, a former National Security Agency researcher who is chief technology officer for Disconnect. He hooked my iPhone into special software so we could examine the traffic. "I know the value of data, and I don't want mine in any hands where it doesn't need to be."

In a world of data brokers, Jackson is the data breaker. He developed an app called Privacy Pro that identifies and blocks many trackers. If you're a little bit techie, I recommend trying the free iOS version to glimpse the secret life of your iPhone.

Yes, trackers are a problem on phones running Google's Android, too. Google won't even let Disconnect's tracker-protection software into its Play Store. (Google's rules prohibit apps that might interfere with another app displaying ads.)

The app gap

Why do trackers activate in the middle of the night? Some app makers have them call home at times the phone is plugged in, or think they won't interfere with other functions. These late-night encounters happen on the iPhone if you have allowed "background app refresh," which is Apple's default.

In one typical example, a food-delivery service app I launched sent data to nine third-party trackers, though you'd have no way to know it. One got a fingerprint of my device (device name, model, ad identifier and memory size) and even accelerometer motion data to help identify fraud. Three more trackers help monitor app performance, including one that routes onward data including your delivery address, name, email and telco.

The other five trackers, including Facebook and Google Ad Services, help the app understand the effectiveness of its marketing. Their presence means Facebook and Google know every time you open the app.

All but one of these nine trackers made Jackson's naughty list for Disconnect, which also powers the Firefox browser's private browsing mode. To him, any third party that collects and retains our data is suspect unless it also has pro-consumer privacy policies like limiting data retention time and anonymising data.

Microsoft, Nike and The Weather Channel told me they were using the trackers I uncovered to improve performance. Mint, owned by Intuit, said it uses an Adobe marketing tracker to help figure out how to advertise to Mint users. The Post said its trackers were used to make sure ads work. 

Spotify pointed me to its privacy policy.

Privacy policies don't necessarily provide protection. Citizen, the app for location-based crime reports, published that it wouldn't share "your name or other personally identifying information." Yet when I ran my test, I found it repeatedly sent my phone number, email and exact GPS coordinates to the tracker Amplitude.

After I contacted Citizen, it updated its app and removed the Amplitude tracker. (Amplitude, for its part, says data it collects for clients is kept private and not sold.)

The letdown

What disappoints me is that the data free-for-all I discovered is happening on an iPhone. Isn't Apple supposed to be better at privacy?

"At Apple we do a great deal to help users keep their data private," the company says in a statement. "Apple hardware and software are designed to provide advanced security and privacy at every level of the system."

In some areas, Apple is ahead. Most of Apple's own apps and services take care to either encrypt data or, even better, to not collect it in the first place. Apple offers a privacy setting called "Limit Ad Tracking" (sadly off by default) which makes it a little bit harder for companies to track you across apps, by way of a unique identifier for every iPhone.

And with iOS 12, Apple took shots at the data economy by improving the "intelligent tracking prevention" in its Safari web browser.

Yet these days, we spend more time in apps. Apple is strict about requiring apps to get permission to access certain parts of the iPhone, including your camera, microphone, location, health information, photos and contacts. (You can check and change those permissions under privacy settings.) But Apple turns more of a blind eye to what apps do with data we provide them or they generate about us; witness the sorts of tracking I found by looking under the covers for a few days.

"For the data and services that apps create on their own, our App Store Guidelines require developers to have clearly posted privacy policies and to ask users for permission to collect data before doing so. When we learn that apps have not followed our Guidelines in these areas, we either make apps change their practice or keep those apps from being on the store," Apple says.

Yet very few apps I found using third-party trackers disclosed the names of those companies or how they protect my data. And what good is burying this information in privacy policies, anyway? What we need is accountability.

Jackson suggests Apple could also add controls into iOS like the ones built into Privacy Pro to give everyone more visibility.

Or perhaps Apple could require apps to label when they're using third-party trackers. If I opened an app and saw nine tracker notices, it might make think twice about using it.

Sheriff cashing in on expired warrants

WARNING: The Victorian government is involved in a crime spree, where the unsuspecting motorist is the victim.

There are a few technicalities where the so called sheriff is acting upon seizures of goods or motor vehicles unlawfully, to be more specific, without the correct paperwork being presented, where also one of the main 'technicalities' is that the deputies are cashing in or trying to cash in on expired (alleged) warrants.

According to the law, in particular the Infringements Act of 2006, under Part 6, Section 94, warrants are VOID after 5 years.

Source: http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/vic/num_act/ia200612o2006207/

MANY people have been duped by the officers who state that the person MUST pay the alleged 'outstanding' warrants, where on a spreadsheet style, a summary is presented where some of the alleged warrants are expired by four or five years.

IF your person has been defrauded of funds by the so called Victorian Sheriff, then you may want to seek a remedy.

Please note that ANY so called warrant MUST exist in its correct format, where an execution copy is to be attached.

Why your biometric unlock is not so 'secure' in the colony called Australia

At the moment in the I.T. industry, biometric (face, fingerprint) unlocking of your smartphone is touted being most secure, but unfortunately this may not be the case under many circumstances.

The brand new (on Australian shelves) Samsung Galaxy S10 has the face unlock feature built into the phone, where unfortunately for the 'consumer' the unlocking feature is not so secure as shown in the link below:

https://corpau.blogspot.com/2019/03/face-unlock-not-so-secure.html

Some people (excluding the footy bogans) may have noticed that the authorities are ramping up the police state policy in this colony we call Australia.

In a deliberate misinformation campaign, only a handful of police 'mishappenings' are ever reported by the mainstream media, where the victims of police criminal activity are not in control of their actions or have had their smartphone confiscated in order not to record criminal activity committed by the police.

(disability pensioner brutally assaulted by Victoria Police)

It's at this point in time where your face id or fingerprint scanning feature of your phone becomes a liability rather than an asset, where when one is (quite often) incapacitated, either being illegally beset upon by eight officers, or just plain vanilla knocked out, one's phone can be easily unlocked.

Another 'plus' for biometric id is the 'free' (well technically, corporate slave sponsored) data it generates which is then taken to further enhance government public scanning programs.

Pattern, picture of PIN unlock is still considered more secure especially with any interaction with Australia's law enforcement (which can go pear shaped very quickly through no fault of your own), unless of course the officers involved are practicing Roman Catholics of yesteryear, where a 'little' torture goes a long way, like the judicial system did back in the day.

Fingerprinting iPhones - identifying your unique phone's 'fingerprint'

Governments will use whatever technology is available to surveil their primary enemy, that being their very own domestic population, their tax payers, the people that they are allegedly supposed to serve.

THE best surveillance device at this point in time, is the smartphone that the masses fully sponsor in order for corporations and government players to spy them.

With the current sensors crammed into smartphones, data is generated to uniquely identify the device together with its user and the environment independent from location services.

See article from schneier.com of the headline:

Fingerprinting iPhones

This clever attack allows someone to uniquely identify a phone when you visit a website, based on data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensors.

We have developed a new type of fingerprinting attack, the calibration fingerprinting attack. Our attack uses data gathered from the accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer sensors found in smartphones to construct a globally unique fingerprint. Overall, our attack has the following advantages:

• The attack can be launched by any website you visit or any app you use on a vulnerable device without requiring any explicit confirmation or consent from you.
• The attack takes less than one second to generate a fingerprint.
• The attack can generate a globally unique fingerprint for iOS devices.
• The calibration fingerprint never changes, even after a factory reset.
• The attack provides an effective means to track you as you browse across the web and move between apps on your phone.

* Following our disclosure, Apple has patched this vulnerability in iOS 12.2.

Research paper.

Snapchat privacy breach (Newsflash: others do it too!)

Just because messages and videos on Snapchat sent in Chat disappear after being read doesn't mean that this content is safely hidden from prying eyes. According to Motherboard (via SlashGear), this data does end up on Snapchat's servers, even if for a brief period of time. And apparently, some employees of Snap (Snapchat's publicly traded parent company) used a special tool to access this content.

Using a tool called SnapLion, created to help law enforcement access information from Snapchat accounts (with a court order or subpoena), some Snap employees were able to access customer data. Snaps that had not yet been deleted, location data, email addresses, and phone numbers were allegedly viewed illegally by people working for the company. These allegations were made by former Snap employees.

Not every person working for the firm uses the SnapLion tool illegally. It is employed by Snapchat's security team and those inside the company who are looking out for members who create abusive posts that bully, harass or spam other members. Snapchat monitors those who use the tool, but apparently, this is not a perfect system according to a former employee. Another person who used to work for Snap said that having access to SnapLion was like owning "the keys to the kingdom."

A Snap employee wouldn't admit that the SnapLion tool was abused by employees, but did say that the company had a "good system in place" to prevent such things from occurring "most likely earlier than any startup in existence."

Snap did issue a statement in which it claims to hold on to only a small amount of user data. The company added that its "robust policies and controls" limit who can see it and anyone employee who views the information without proper authorization is immediately fired.

"Protecting privacy is paramount at Snap. We keep very little user data, and we have robust policies and controls to limit internal access to the data we do have. Unauthorized access of any kind is a clear violation of the company's standards of business conduct and, if detected, results in immediate termination."-Snap spokesman

This past January, Snapchat added end-to-end encryption three years after Amnesty International had Snapchat ranked as one of the least protected messaging apps in terms of member privacy.

Source: phonearena.com

Nefarious push for your data to be online

There is a huge (nefarious) push by corporations (who are in bed with governments) to force / entice / reward users to put all their data onto the internet under a mystical marketing label called the cloud, which in reality is someone else's computer systems.

You are 'enticed' to upload your private and confidential data like your PRIVATE passwords,  POS (Point Of Sale) figures, your accounting software's analytics, your private correspondence you composed in Microsoft's products, for 'free' where now you can even use apps to create CAD (Computer Aided Design) drawings which realistically is MAD (Mobile Aided Design?), in order to capture every part of your life.

Technically nothing is for 'free', where people may associate this term, as being without charge, but there is a cost attached, just maybe not passed onto that 'person', at that very instant of the transaction taking place, or it is incorporated elsewhere.

YOUR data stored on a 'free' platform is no longer 'yours' which basically means that this data is used for monetary gain, in whichever way the storage provider sees fit, whether it's disclosed or not.

Once upon a time if authorities needed access to your documents, then (maybe) a search warrant had to have been issued, together with a fair few able bodied people travelling in a gas guzzling vehicle to the place of interest, where a break in may had to occur with the possibility of a scuffle or three, where maybe filing cabinets needed to be removed and sifted through.

All this hard work is now obsolete, where you the 'data generator' stores ALL your information for 'free' in the cloud, where warrants are a distant faded memory and your data is obtained by one person to do what they have been instructed to do, or even do whatever they choose themselves to do with that data.

The 'problem' there is that too many people are choosing to give their data to unknown sources for free, i.e. no monetary compensation.

Now now, let's not make too much noise with the "nothing to hide nothing to fear" propaganda slogan.