Why would the government have to be the source? Do you turn off your Bluetooth, NFC and WiFi whenever you leave the house? All that shit is constantly broadcasting and searching for networks or paired devices, and thus the data can be scrapped from anywhere. They specifically mention ad data in this Twitter post, so I would assume he had an app on his phone that he gave access to scan Bluetooth or something and it harvested the data they're citing. 5g makes this concept even easier, which is why there's a 5g antenna on every third light pole in the city near me.
If you're on Android and want to see something scary, download BLE Scanner app, go to a busy intersection and see how quickly you'll have a lot of every device at that intersection (hundreds of them) in just a minute of scanning. Then go out to a rural country road with little traffic and wait for a car to drive by. You'll be able to pin point exactly which devices are in their car with individual mac addresses. Now imagine you're in the FBI and you have that ability and then also the ability to look up their license plate, or cameras in other places with Bluetooth logging capabilities, or facial recognition cameras, or, or, or. It would be super easy to identify a car, or person associated with each device. They've got us by the balls, there is no privacy with a cell phone.
Dude we've been losing our privacy at lightning speed. Let's say shooter downloaded a weather widget app. Innocuous enough, right? And it asks for Bluetooth permission to check if you have any weather station equipment, and you give it to it. It can now scan Bluetooth constantly and pick up nearby Mac addresses, device types and names, dates and times and distance from the user's cell phone and log all that info. Even if the weather app creator isn't part of the privacy invasion, they'll definitely sell that data to other companies. Now the shooters phone tracks it, and it's not unrealistic to expect a popular weather widget app could possibly be on another random person's phone in the area of an FBI building in downtown Washington DC, which would pick up the mystery cell phone user's Mac address and all the other info to add to the database. Now the third party privacy infringer has all the info they need to say the same person, or at least the same device was in those two places. Then it never pops up again? Burner phone, it's gone. I'd call that pretty solid evidence. I always vet my apps and don't give them unnecessary permissions, but this particular setup doesn't even need your participation in downloading the app, you're getting tracked by other idiots that aren't careful with permissions and the only way to avoid it is to lock down your connectivity settings so they're not broadcasting everywhere you go, which turns out to be a big inconvenience to do normal things with your phone.
Why would the government have to be the source? Do you turn off your Bluetooth, NFC and WiFi whenever you leave the house? All that shit is constantly broadcasting and searching for networks or paired devices, and thus the data can be scrapped from anywhere. They specifically mention ad data in this Twitter post, so I would assume he had an app on his phone that he gave access to scan Bluetooth or something and it harvested the data they're citing. 5g makes this concept even easier, which is why there's a 5g antenna on every third light pole in the city near me.
If you're on Android and want to see something scary, download BLE Scanner app, go to a busy intersection and see how quickly you'll have a lot of every device at that intersection (hundreds of them) in just a minute of scanning. Then go out to a rural country road with little traffic and wait for a car to drive by. You'll be able to pin point exactly which devices are in their car with individual mac addresses. Now imagine you're in the FBI and you have that ability and then also the ability to look up their license plate, or cameras in other places with Bluetooth logging capabilities, or facial recognition cameras, or, or, or. It would be super easy to identify a car, or person associated with each device. They've got us by the balls, there is no privacy with a cell phone.
My point is it's not just the FBI that has the ability to do this stuff.
Dude we've been losing our privacy at lightning speed. Let's say shooter downloaded a weather widget app. Innocuous enough, right? And it asks for Bluetooth permission to check if you have any weather station equipment, and you give it to it. It can now scan Bluetooth constantly and pick up nearby Mac addresses, device types and names, dates and times and distance from the user's cell phone and log all that info. Even if the weather app creator isn't part of the privacy invasion, they'll definitely sell that data to other companies. Now the shooters phone tracks it, and it's not unrealistic to expect a popular weather widget app could possibly be on another random person's phone in the area of an FBI building in downtown Washington DC, which would pick up the mystery cell phone user's Mac address and all the other info to add to the database. Now the third party privacy infringer has all the info they need to say the same person, or at least the same device was in those two places. Then it never pops up again? Burner phone, it's gone. I'd call that pretty solid evidence. I always vet my apps and don't give them unnecessary permissions, but this particular setup doesn't even need your participation in downloading the app, you're getting tracked by other idiots that aren't careful with permissions and the only way to avoid it is to lock down your connectivity settings so they're not broadcasting everywhere you go, which turns out to be a big inconvenience to do normal things with your phone.