EFF brought a lawsuit against the US government over social media AI powered mass surveilence. The Government tried to dismiss the suit on multiple grounds. Lack of standing, lack of of injury, pre-enforcement, and others.

The EFF prevailed on every point. The suit against the administration can go forward. Whether EFF prevails on the merits of the case, we will see. But it is a good start. The court was sympathetic to the EFF's arguments so far.

The court disagreed, explaining that “Plaintiffs’ allegations are of an ongoing surveillance program that is actively chilling the speech of their members and otherwise causing harm.” That chilling effect is a First Amendment injury even if there isn’t a direct prohibition on speech. And when government conduct is actively chilling speech right now, a challenge to it isn’t pre-enforcement.

Please resist the pull of thinking that even if the EFF wins the case, it is useless b/c it does not solve every privacy problem. We will never have a single nail to strike with a single hammer. There are many battles in the war for privacy. The more won, the better.

IMO it is good to donate money to the EFF. Lets them fund high powered attorneys and fight the good fight. Their site has donation link right in top menu bar -> https://www.eff.org/

I wanna sign up for Patreon. Reason is, to give money to some podcasters, musicians, OSS authors. Ppl I think are doing good things. That's how they accept donations.

But was there a privacy clusterfuck? Of course there was!

In October 2015, the site was the target of a large cyber-attack, with almost 15 gigabytes of password data, donation records, and source code taken and published. The breach exposed more than 2.3 million unique e-mail addresses and millions of private messages. Following the attack, some patrons received extortion emails ...

I tried to signup privately. I only want to give money to ppl. Well if you use a VPN you get a total cloudfare gauntlet. Every page load, prove you are human! You can sign up with a masked card and a VPN, but they insta-ban you. Before you can sign-in even once, acct is locked.

Has anyone signed up in a kinda private way? How?

I can't "just use this one cryptocurrency bro" b/c the creators I want to give money to only are on Patreon.

FFS. I'm trying to give money away! I don't have to, but I belive we should support ppl doing good things for the world. Can't even do that privtaely I guess.

I made up the title b/c the URL is to the court's finding. Doesn't have a title per se.

TLDR (ruling is 38 pages, so this is BRIEF gd!)

Driver was stopped for following too close. Officer gave warning, but no citation. Officer ran ALPR history, then searched car based on ALPR. Driver admitted to having marijuana in the vehicle, which officer said he didn't care about, and was only after hard drugs. ALPR history had driver driving a long distance for a short visit to the state.

Court ruled:

1. Traffic stop was legal and justified by observed violation. Officer had reasonable basis to stop driver.

2. The subsequent search was NOT constitutional, since officer did not have a warrant for ALPR data, and had no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.

Result from ruling,

(Driver) has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the location data which tracked her movements over several weeks. .... The ALPR search was an unreasonable governmental intrusion of protected privacy rights.

Vehicle search result was quashed.

There's lots more nuance in the linked filing. Also citations. It's really good IMO. It balances the privacy of the driver's vehicle with the legit justification for the stop. It also notes how "persistent, dragnet surveilence" differs from other kinds. Kudos to judge Sara Hill for really digging in and understanding the privacy issues, esp around pg 28+ of the ruling.

It's long but totally worth a read. The case does not set a binding precedent.

The legal situation is FAR from perfect. But I hope just once we can have a thread where a ton of ppl don't immediately go, "this good privacy news is useless b/c it does not solve every single problem every single time!" It is evidence in favor of a slow but meaningful shift in ALPR jurisprudence. It stands along side recent SCOTUS rulings that also boost location data privacy, like Chatrie v United States and Carpenter v United States.

TLDR: Flock is moving beyond fixed roadside cameras, into drone surveilance.

With a fixed camera, you might be able to alter your travels to avoid it. In practice that is hard due to how many there are. But you can try. A drone can be anywhere. You prob won't even know it is present most of the time. You cannot change your routes to avoid it.

We now know that Flock does not log only plates. It also IDs pedestrians and cyclists, ppl on scooters or skateboards. It seeks to build a complete picture of the movements of a whole population.

I bet most ppl here do not use Meta products. But some may have to for w/e reason. Or you may know ppl who do. Also in the bigger world, it sitll has billions of users, 2.1B every day. This is Meta improving your experience unless you know how to opt out.

I just threw up in my mouth a little bit writing that.

Meta is planning to use the data shared by other businesses to personalize your feed and its AI responses. In a blog post on Tuesday, Meta explains that it already uses your off-platform activity, like the games you play or your purchases on other websites, to serve you ads. But now it’s expanding the scope of the content it personalizes across Facebook and Instagram.

For example, Meta says if you bought a tent online recently, you might see camping-related videos in your Reels feed. “We aren’t collecting any new data as part of this update,” the blog post says. “This is about using information that businesses already send to us to further improve your experience.”

Edit -> putting link here instead of in post URL to avoid auto-embed of YT vid.

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/meet-floridas-flock-blocker-the-man-who-sits-in-front-of-alpr-cameras-all-day/

77 yo guy in Florida sits in front of Flock cameras for hours, holding up a strategically placed protest sign. There are social media claims the man was arrested. But that looks like misinfo. Police talked to him, but journalists found no arrest record, plus,

Police have said that his protest is legal because he is not damaging or tampering with the cameras.

Gunn uses a 12-foot pole from his pool and a broomstick to extend it. He attaches the sign to the end and positions it in front of the camera lens. So anyone accessing footage from that Flock camera will only see the sign “Down with the Flock.” He is careful to choose only Flock camera locations where he won’t obstruct sidewalks, WUSF reported.

A man of the people. And of the pedestrians!

Anyone in or near St Pete should buy this guy free lunches.

From the Verge, Americans are cheering for vigilantes who take down Flock cameras

What kind of pre-enshittification tech do you all use? Stuff where ppl look at you like you're an alien b/c nobody does it that any more.

Me ->

Oldschool offline mp3 player rather than Spottify or other streaming or phone app, to use when running.

Paper books rather than e-books.

DRM free games I buy on GOG to avoid rootkitting my own comp.

Wired speakers rather than smart speakers.

Old ass pre-connected car.

Prob more but I can't think of it all rn.

In stopped clock is right twice a day news, Florida is moving to ban Flocks from state highways.

Aside from Florida, there is a bunch of momentum all around the US now. Some cities just moved to another ALPR vendor like Axon. That sucks ofc. But many have eliminated ALPR entirely too, after citizens spoke out! Some cities had a constant stream of ppl speaking at city council meetings about it, months on end, dozens of ppl in every meeting.

It's harder to deal with Flocks on private property. Like Home Depot and Lowes. A city gov terminating its own contract, doesn't stop Home Depot. I dream of a coordinated, nation-wide boycott of co's that put private Flocks in their lots. And letting them know exactly why.

Let's keep the anti ALPR momentum going. It's starting to see results. And don't fall into the illogic of thinking it's not perfect, therefore it's useless.

Flock, and other ALPR companies like Axon, Motorola, and Verkada have been adding capabilities to gather signals from airpods, smart watches, fitness trackers, even toll lane passes.

There were allegations too about TPMS. That is harder, b/c TPMS do not xmit actively. The power comes only from reflecting a received RF, so it is weak. But it may not be impossible. The car itself gets the signals like that, tho shorter range. There may be a larger antenna on the roadside than your car uses, to capture weaker signals. Unclear if it's possible. But unclear it isn't!

TPMS started in 1980s. It didn't get real widespread until 2000s. But even "older" cars, safe from online telematics, still may have TPMS. If there is any way for Flock and the rest to use it as a fingerprint, they will. TPMS has a unique ID.

So I started looking. Can TPMS be removed at home? Answer is, kinda. It's a little hard without special tire equipment, and it may fuck up the tire balance. A shop can do it, but IDK if they are legally allowed to.

But would that do anything for you? TBH I doubt it helps much. The ALPRs use so many techniques. Plates, ofc. Also scratches. Dents. Bumper stickers. Trailer hitches. Ski racks. Window stickers and passes. Any distinguishing aspect of the vehicle. There are even rumors they can use FR on the driver, but IDK if that has been substantiated. So TPMS delete maybe not worth the squeeze.

Even avoiding ALL emissions, portable devices and TPMS, the ALPR can still ID you in enough other ways. Optical side harder to defeat than radio side.

Once, we could drive without private companies recording everywhere we go. We could even travel from state to state. No papers.

Couple days ago. Hanging out with a few friends, burgers and beers at a sit down place. Not high end, but not McDs either. Normal place.

I notice a girl one table over is clearly doing a whole ass livestream or sth. Not just a quick selfie. Clearly streaming. Wagging her phone all around, for like 10+ minutes.

My friends didn't even notice. I'm mad tho, b/c I don't wanna be on whatever shit some influencer is gonna u/l the stream to. Prob youtube or her IG or w/e.

But nothing I can do. Getting up to ask her to cut it TF out would only have made it worse. That just makes me content fodder!

That is all. Thank you for coming to my rant, and I hope you are all having a good day.

This was posted to cybersecurity and I am not sure how to make a proper crosspost. Or even if that is a thing I can do. So just dropping a lemmy link in the url. Hope that is OK. The external link is here -> https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/privacy/2026/08/aliexpress-caught-using-silent-audio-to-fingerprint-visitors-browsers

Given how much fingerprinting relates to privacy, seems related for this group too. Yet Another Fingerprinting Technique. It doesn’t record the user, just a silent signal which still has variance due to the unique device.

researchers and browser maker Brave reported finding silent Web Audio processing on the site that could help fingerprint visitors’ devices.

on top of that, the traditional fingerprinting signals are used too,

The scripts also gathered information tied to canvas rendering, WebGL, display settings, hardware configuration, WebRTC behavior and user interactions. Together, those signals can create a more detailed profile of a device than any one signal would provide on its own.

Story about low priced Anko branded competitor to Meta smart glasses. The story author calls out that despite Meta's attempts to prevent recording if the LED is covered, it is easy to get around the block. I think it's good for mainstream press to say it, so more ppl realize. They also call out that human moderators at Meta review their smart glasses footage. Inc videos of people having sex or using the toilet.

IDK if public backlash will nix the market for these, or if opposition will dry up and in 10 more years they will be mainstream tech like smartphones are today. I could see it going either way TBH.

It scares me that one of those timelines leads to a hellscape worse than the one we already have.

Link from the local news org

Link says he's charged with petit larceny, which is a misdemeanor in USA. IDK where the destruction of property charges land.

He's receiving donations for his defense from across the country.

Posting some recent good or funny news to say happy 4th to my fellow Americans. And happy Canada Day to our friends to the north. Not sure about Flocks exactly, but I heard of ALPR use in Ontario, maybe other provs too.

Gizmodo: Flock Cameras Have a People-Love-Smashing-Them Problem. People just aren't being very nice to these mass surveillance devices. A sticker with the note, “Hahaha get wrecked ya surveilling f***s” was applied to one of the poles below the spot where it was cut.

Several ppl doing it have been caught, often due to other Flock camneras who follow their movements across their city.

Also 100's of stories out there about municipalities across dozens of states not renewing Flock contracts due to mounting public pressure. It's not univerally good, some are looking toward other vendors. But many are stopping ALPR completely too!

Jalopnik: Unsure With How To Cancel Service, City Officials Are Covering Flock Cameras With Trash Bags Until They Can Be Removed. Dayton, Ohio's utility poles are sporting new accessories this week in the form of a black trash bag. Police and local authorities are working to cover the controversial Flock cameras installed throughout the city as they try to figure out how to severe ties with the company.

Citizen engagement does help. We need to keep the momentum going. Pls get involved locally if you can! A hundred ppl showing up at a city council meeting to speak out against ALPRs carries more political weight than 10 thousand emails.

Gonna vaguepost so I don't self dox too much. Had to replace a dead appliance this week. Got a lightly used replacement, no choice about which. It had a wifi spot build in. It would talk to any phone with the mfg app. No auth other than having the app installed! WTF.

You couldn't disable that! Well not thru the panel controls. Web says you can do it with the phone app. IF you make an account with the mfg for your appliance first. Rofl!

Maybe this approach will help others. What I did was, searched the schematics online. Most appliances, you can find it. Searching model number + schematic often works. There are sites that catalog them.

Using the schematic, I found a connector that powered the wifi. Unplugged that. Re-powered appliance. Confirmed wifi was gone.

My neighbors are not gonna hijack my appliance over wifi, so I wasn't worried about that. I guess it could find an open WAP and phone home. TBH it was mostly the principle of the thing tho! I don't want ANY n/w on my appliances, thank you. Ya know?

It's a tiny skirmish in the war against IOT. Editing here to quote Aragorn, who famously said about IOT, "There may come a day when my appliances connect to the internet. But it is not THIS day!"

We don't get a lot of privacy wins. Ya know? I'll take whatever we can get.

I linked the wiki page for this court case. As of me typing now, page hasn't been updated with the court decision. Prob will be soon. If you want the rawdog court document, it's here.

TLDR. SCOTUS just decided that geofence warrants require 4th amendment protection. For the non-USA peeps, 4A is protection against gov searches without a warrant granted with probable cause. The court decided that since everyone now carries a smartphone everywhere, and loc data is highly personal, police geofence requests require a judicial warrant. In the same way one is required for the police to search your home.

Before anybody goes off about how "this doesn't matter"... This does not restrict commercial data collection. Even so, it does matter. It is a step in a good direction, and will have real world impacts. It might even change the landscape around Flocks. Another positive step happened a while ago, in Carpenter vs the United States, about historical cell site location data.

Have you tried them for privacy purposes? What are your experiences?

Here is mine. I've used the Visa prepaid cards. Where I live (USA) you can buy them "anonymously". Scare quotes because sure, nothing is 100% anonymous now. But you can buy them with cash and activate them without giving a phone #. Not quite as anonymous as cash, but close. It avoids the heavy data trail of a normal CC. And you can use them sometimes where you can't use cash.

But there's the prob. It's hit and miss if they work. Unfortunately, these are HUGE among scammers, so those scammer fucks poisoned the well. Some stores will flat out deny them. Other times, they work fine.

I've had probs at some point of sale terminals, others work OK. Ditto gas pumps. Seems to be no way to know which way it'll go without trying. Which means you gotta have another way to pay lined up.

I haven't tried them for online shopping yet.

Hey you beautiful privacy scoundrels! You magnificently private rascals and scamps!

I used this tool for a long time. Well I found something new and wanted to share.

Firejail is an easy single shot sandboxer. It's easier than spinning up a whole ass VM. You can read about it if you wanna. What I wanted to share is, the network part of it. Which I never knew about before today!

There's an option called netlock. What it does is, it tracks any outgoing network IP the sandboxed app connects to for 60s. Then everything after that is blocked. That will print the block list it uses. You can edit it if you want, as a base. Adding or removing addresses, w/e. When you are happy, you can save and use it with the netfilter option.

It's great for let's say a podcast app, that will connect to one or a few IPs, but should not send anything to anywhere else. Or even apps that should be 100% local, and you want to keep honest apps honest.

You can do all that with a VM too, by using firewalls and w/e. But this is handy for one off uses. Cases you don't want a whole ass VM. If you trust an app to not be a trojan, but you don't totally trust where it might phone home to. You can make sure it of what it's doing. Like block analytics, but allowing a legit network endpoint for functionality.

Full docs here.

The promise of technology was to expand our horizons. In many ways, it kinda did. We got a lot of awesome shit. But we also got {waves hands vaguely at everything} this dystopia.

I love tech! But I hate techno-surveilance. There are things I don't do b/c of it. Or things I do less now.

For example. I wanted to volunteer on a trail maintaining crew. But they're all TF over FB and Tiktok. They put everyone's photos on there. Vids of ppl working. They coordinate on FB groups.

I give up conveniences like google maps. Esp when those conveniences come with baked in surveilance. My friends mock my paper map. But w/e.

I take less road trips than I want. I hate having all my travel logged by ALPR. Even driving an old ass car without onboard GPS.

Are there things you would do, but you don't, b/c of techno-dystopia? Or you do them less?

Lawsuit in California, plaintiffs vs the Mouse, about facial recogmition in theme parks.

“When American families and their children visit a theme park, let alone a brand that’s as ubiquitous as Disney, they shouldn’t sacrifice their privacy rights when they enter,” Yagman said in a statement. “And as facial recognition becomes more common, and it proliferates in public places, especially, it’s more important than ever that we protect people’s privacy rights, because there are civil rights implications and privacy implications to collecting someone’s biometric information, especially without adequate consent, which is what we’ve alleged.

Seems to be.. the Mouse provides a way to bypass those lines. But that way is obscure and unclear to guests. So most ppl don't even know it is hapepning. Let alone which lines can bypass it.

the park has small signs at some security checkpoints notifying guests of the facial recognition policy, “but the sign is adorned with red, green, yellow, and blue Mickey Mouse silhouettes and is very easy to miss.”

This tech is also common, maybe unavoidable? at many sporting events in the US now. Major stadiums, that sort of thing.