Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/15/telcos-selling-realtime-abil.html
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Outside the U.S. it’s worse than that. Telcel Mexico has a telemarketing division that directly targets its customer base at their cellular numbers. The only advantage there is over phone calls at dinnertime on land lines in the 1970s is the ability to identify your personal contacts with your smartphone and block the rest.
I’m also noticing ten-second Android ads that I can’t block or mute when I try to open an app. Mission creep is fully underway.
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A couple more big terrorist attacks and your cell phone will become the equivalent of the Telescreens in 1984. The doubleplusungood part is that most people will not bat and eye about it.
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My phone won’t connect to either of those. Thanks AdAway!
I can’t wait to get my iPhone X so I can pay big money to scan the color and geometry of my face and add it to a big database!
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Hey, if you have nothing to hide, this is no big deal, until a Democrat becomes president, at which point it becomes Big Brother rounding us up into FEMA camps to force us to take Spanish lessons.
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There might be phones that do that (and if there aren’t, there will be), but an iPhone won’t be one of them. The iPhone X will not give access to the face scanner without explicit consent, and will not give access to your locally stored face geometry to anyone, including Apple.
Of the things to dislike about Apple, compromising users’ privacy is not one of them. As one of the few big tech companies that gets 100% of its revenue from its customers, Apple has a completely genuine, financial interest in keeping your data private (by contrast with Google or Facebook, which have a financial interest in the exact opposite).
Not that this particular conversation has anything to do with Apple, because if your phone provider sells you out then you’re boned no matter what phone you have.
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Every day, there’s a new article that makes me glad about avoiding smart phone ownership or use.
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I’ve been routing all my traffic through a self hosted VPN called Algo. Hosting is $5 a month on Digital Ocean.
They offer the option during setup to filter out ads before they reach the device. And a VPN means anyone querying my cell data logs will simply see a connection to the VPN’s IP, not extremely personal and embarrassing websites like Bing.
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VPN. VPN for everything. Always. I’m hoping that the powers that be, being run by tech- and people- and reality-illiterates as they clearly are will squeeze too much and too soon and induce Joe Public to check out the powerful privacy tools that only need a viable user base to secure us against those who’d spy on us and censor our media for us. After all…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY57ErBkFFE
Whoa! You can’t say things like that! This is a family forum! Young’uns might be watching!
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The face scans on an iPhone are stored only on the phone, try again.
Try what, exactly?
Hanging shit on Apple, obvs.
I’m not in the US, but fuck it - finally just got around to installing the Android app for the VPN I’ve been subscribed to for a year or two.
Try again.
And why are you installing Android apps? When I read that I almost dropped my iPhone.
They can have all the IPs of all the VPNs. 
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