Privacy Through Obfuscation

   Chris Price on Dec 2 21:36:28

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I came upon an interesting solution to a largely ignored element of personal privacy. Many of us are aware of how vulnerable we are to online surveillance, whereby our every move around the internet is likely tracked, and then sold to data aggregators and marketing firms. Purchasers or thieves of our compiled online activities have access to richly detailed profiles based on our browsing history, social media posts and comments, purchases, etc. We are finely categorized within increasingly more specific demographic groups that identify us by our politics, religion, livelihoods, material affluence, influence, location, etc.

The one largely ignored aspect of this surveillance is geolocation. While we can try to obfuscate our identity and activity by using VPNs, proxies, and other relays to appear to be operating somewhere far removed from our actual location, the reality is that it's a hit-or-miss proposition. Eventually, enough clues are uncovered to reveal our true location. Our phones, their operating systems, our mobile providers, and our ISPs betray our location privacy. There are plenty of apps to provide content privacy in online communications, mostly through E2E (End-to-End) encryption, but there's no convenient way to avoid the ability of our cellular service providers to track us. We have to connect to their towers.

Other than cycling through burner phones using prepaid minutes and data purchased with cash while trying to disguise ourselves to evade the security cameras with facial recognition in and around the vendors of the prepaid phones and minutes, while also leaving your burner phone somewhere far removed from your regular purchases of these items, there's no way to stay anonymous for long. Even these gyrations will eventually prove futile. Surveillance Capitalism

is the science tying all of these disparate elements together to uniquely identify and profile us.

A new company has emerged with a new approach, initially targeted for high-risk individuals. If you're involved in public or private security, a mental health or legal or financial professional responsible for maintaining client confidentiality, or perhaps involved in cryptocurrency, you can get some level of security through a new phone service provider. A provider who will help to anonymize you by allowing you to change the unique identifiers built into the cellular service ecosystem. You'll be able to rotate through personas that you create on your favorite phone, rather than cycling through burner phones and accounts. You'll be able to obfuscate your identity (as revealed by your phone) and therefore your location.

Most of us aren't high-risk targets, because most of us aren't investigative journalists, or involved in personal security relationships with high-risk business people, celebrities, or government officials. But if you're affluent or involved in politics or social causes, if you're under witness protection or temporary restraining orders for your safety, you could find yourself actively pursued and specifically tracked, even if only because of your associations.

Cape is the company providing a new approach. They will provide cellular service in the same way that MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) like US Cellular, Boost, Cricket, etc. provide discounted service, by buying access to the 3 main cellular networks at wholesale prices and repackaging that access. But unlike the other MVNOs, they'll require a lot less identifying information about you, which means if they're the target of an information breach, there won't be a lot of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) metadata floating around to compromise you. By virtue of the ability to cycle through preset and spurious personas on the phone, the previously unique metadata identifiers associated with network tower connections won't reveal your movements and identity.

This was a long-winded summary, to be sure. If you're interested in the topic, peruse the following links for more details and implications. This is not a complete solution, but it does plug a significant hole. In conjunction with a privacy-optimized phone, along with E2E content protection, online location obfuscation, and best practices, you can create enough confusion about yourself to avoid or interfere with targeting.

https://www.404media.co/i-dont-own-a-cellphone-can-this-privacy-focused-network-change-that/

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/18/cape-dials-up-61m-from-a16z-more-for-mobile-service-that-doesnt-use-personal-data/

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/30/att-reset-account-passcodes-customer-data/

https://www.cape.co/

Tags: mobile cellular privacy geolocation

#1

Carl Milsted, Jr on Dec 2, 2024 10:44 PM
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Cool!

In general, there can be no privacy for any product which requires delivery to your home.

And unfortunately, a cash only business cannot have the selection of Amazon or Ebay.

Possible solution: an in person business which takes cash but stocks based on crypto deposits. Make a crypto order and get a coupon which you can present in person. Don't show up, and the item goes on general sale after a time. If you show up with the coupon and the item has already been sold, another gets ordered and the coupon is still good.

For the customer, the risk is the item is not there if you don't show up in time. For the business, the danger is getting stuck with merchandise which doesn't move. Jiggle the numbers and there is likely a win-win sweet spot.

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#2

Chris Price on Dec 3, 2024 1:19 PM
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in response to comment_128_1

Understood and agreed. The whole trust paradigm requires us to surrender PII to extend our reach, whether for convenience, necessity or economic advantage. The Big Data approach by our "trusted" vendors of data mining all of our transaction history linked to our PII for the purpose of monetization, selling it to aggregators, created and expands this Surveillance Capitalism system in which we live. Especially because increasingly all retail, whether in cyberspace or meatspace, has become Big Retail. Corporatization and consolidation created an oligarchy of Big Bank, Big Retail, Big Everything where successful startups have to structure themselves similarly to attract Venture Capital (swimming in the Shark Tank) with the hope of going public and/or selling out to Amazon or a direct competitor.

It's an interesting trap we've built for ourselves, gilded with convenience and padded with amenities we don't want to surrender. And so we've surrendered to it.

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