Surveillance vendors caught abusing access to telcos to track people's locations

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/23/surveillance-vendors-caught-abusing-access-to-telcos-to-track-peoples-phone-locations-researchers-say/

#HackerNews #surveillance #privacy #telcos #locationtracking #dataabuse #cybersecurity

OK, so traffic has increased. Lots of data reported as a % change. If traffic increases by 50%, what was the baseline count? What is the impact on travel times? What is the count distribution with time? Shock headline - "...made Sunset traffic worse ... shows street congestion is on the rise on the city's west side." Traffic counts are not the same as congestion. % increase alone tells you nothing about impact.

And drawing conclusions from the Tuesday after the closure ignores 2 possibilities: 1) Many people may not have been aware of the change, driving by habit and suddenly realizing that it was closed and 2) drivers will take a while to reset their commute path. (My carpool partner and I found many ways around congestion in the pre-GoogleMaps days - but it took a while to settle on the best routes for us)

https://sfstandard.com/2025/04/07/great-highway-san-francisco-traffic-worse-sunset/

#ClickbaitHeadline #DataAbuse #IntoleranceMongering

I am kinda on the Karmic side of #infotech

If you were lazy ok with corps eating all your data because #privacy was not your concern.

Or worse, were one of those Muppets who espoused "I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear" and accepted ubiquitous #surveillance from your Government without any action on your part...

...you absolutely have no leg to stand on and get all squeally about #ai #generative #llm eating all your precious doodles and unpublishable writings you blogged.

You allowed this to happen by your inaction.

Just because you were unequipped to see the consequences, you were happy to abandon us, who tried to hold the thin red line against the #dataabuse.

I looked over my shoulder, and there was no one behind us.
These things do not happen overnight and if we had strong regulatory regime, we would not be here now.
Instead the public stampeded into the cloud and big data like farm animals to slaughter.

#ai #aihate #eff #efa

#Meta #AI #DataAbuse #NOYBeu

https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-urges-11-dpas-immediately-stop-metas-abuse-personal-data-ai

While reviewing our browser logs, this one popped up: does anybody know the #Velen #Crawler #useragent?

The page states it's a data scraping tool for #AI, but it does not provide any information on who is collecting this kind of data.

The IP address was from the #Google #Cloud infrastructure, still no clue on who's the owner.

And thanks to the #GDPR worst idea ever of hiding the #WHOIS information to "protect users", now we can't try understanding who's behind this potential #dataabuse. ✌

Update: cleared down below in the thread

Time to update your robots.txt to let google know that you do not want to participate in their AI training material. Your data - your right!

https://blog.google/technology/ai/an-update-on-web-publisher-controls/

#AI #dataAbuse #google #bard #vertexai

@oldmanmike Socialize the birdsite, without compensation.

Media with the influential, manipulative reach like twitter's don't belong into the hands of histrionic fascist toddlers, who guarantee abuse of power.

#DisownMusk #SocializeTwitter #Disinformation #Misinformation #Manipulation #Incitement #Extremism #Terrorism #InterNationalSecurityThreat #NegligentModeration #DataAbuse #Privacy

Facebook to Pay $725 Million to settle Lawsuit Over Cambridge Analytica Data Leak

#DataLeak #DataAbuse #Facebook #Accountability #News

https://thehackernews.com/2022/12/facebook-to-pay-725-million-to-settle.html