Let's make data brokers broke

from here and here

125 million phones could cover more than a third of the population of the entire United States, and yet I've never even heard of the company Kochava before. If this single unknown company is tracking that many people, just think of how many people are being tracked by all the other unknown data brokers out there. 

Timmies rustling your privacy jimmies

from here and here

I wonder how much of peoples data plans got used up by this app sending location data to the server every few minutes. If you want to get away with something you're gonna have to be more discreet than that.

Like an ankle monitor in your pocket

from here

I can't get over how carceral the policies about this college's mandatory tracking app are. It really does seem like the students are being voluntold to submit to house arrest at the college, and the app is a technical control that helps enforce that.

I understand there are concerns about COVID-19 and re-opening the school, but there are more privacy-friendly ways, and heck maybe it would be better if the school didn't re-open and went online instead.

I am curious what the school administration would do if a student said they didn't have a phone. Would they buy the student a phone? Probably not. They want the features of an ankle monitoring without having to pay for the hardware or infrastructure so they offload that cost onto the students. It's like the gig economy (exploitative as that is) but for hardware.

A taste of their own medicine

from here and here (image source)

Now that one of the world's most notorious spy organizations thinks the data collected and sold by Silicon Valley is a national security threat, maybe they'll have a change of heart about all that data they're collecting about ordinary people like you and me.

It's for the ads - oops, I mean security

from here (image source)

I feel like Zuckerberg got caught telling a fib here. Like the so-called security functions the location data is supposedly used for are just an excuse to allow them to continue feeding the data into their ad machine. Like the regulatory version of plot-armour.