Mastodawn

Kashmir Hill Dec 22, 2022

A tech company source used to make me turn off my phone before meetings because of concern that his employer would check to see if our phones were near each other. This was not a crazy concern it turns out! TikTok tried something like this to hunt down leakers: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/technology/byte-dance-tik-tok-internal-investigation.html

ByteDance Inquiry Finds Employees Obtained User Data of 2 Journalists

The company’s internal investigation showed that workers also obtained data on a small number of other U.S. users.

The New York Times

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J. Peterson Dec 22, 2022

@kashhill The Reply All podcast did a story on Facebook's data collection, and discovered your phone's proximity to other phones was a key data vector they used for targeting ads & recommendations.

TIP: Never download a social app. Just spies on you & runs your battery down. Access via the web page instead. Closing the tab == no spying.

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Kashmir Hill Dec 23, 2022

@isonno really? I was never able to confirm that to be the case though I did reporting on their use of location. Have a link to that episode handy?

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J. Peterson

@kashhill Here's the one that comes to mind:

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/z3hlwr

People suspected FB was eavesdropping, but some of the situations could be explained by correlating phone location data.

A ProPublica reporter in this episode describes FB collecting an estimated 52,000 different data elements per user to use for targeting and recommendations.

#109 Is Facebook Spying on You?

This year we’ve gotten one question from listeners more than any other: is Facebook eavesdropping on my conversations and showing me ads based on the things that I say? This week, Alex investigates.

Gimlet