404 MediaBREAKING: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones.
7heoLeaving that here for people to remember to leave their trackers at home:
A FOSS ROM will not necessarily save you: while qualcomm's XTRA daemon runs in userspace and not as a firmware as previously reported, it might very well be included in a FOSS ROM (like the stock Fairphone one).
Of course, this says nothing about trackers in any proprietary blob firmware, which are definitely a possibility (and a more advantageous one on many respects).
Andres@7heo @404mediaco This says it's in the OS, not the firmware. Clearly occurring in some Free Software OSes, but it's not a given that it will happen in all of them (and Graphene apparently fixed it?)
@Andres4NY @404mediaco this is correct, and I actually remember now, my bad for posting wrong information, and thank you *very much* for allowing me to correct myself. I will edit the incriminating post. 😇
That being said, all we know is that this particular tracker is in userspace. This does not invalidate the possibility of trackers in firmware (be it blobs coming with the OS or even microcode).
@7heo @404mediaco Absolutely something to be vigilant about. We need more FOSS alternatives that aggressively check for this kind of thing..
@Andres4NY @404mediaco absolutely. I have such a project on my todo list.
I just hope to get to that point before I die. 😅