Yeah, I do believe it's a good tool for search, just with the caveat that if it can't find an answer it makes one up or otherwise kinda just fills in little missing details with noise.
potatopotato
joined 2 years ago
That's the question, what are they actually providing to warrants. You don't need to provide a name to be able to identify someone. Do they provide logs or data that could be uniquely identifying before the police pull a tower dump? Who knows...
The LLMs are just somewhere between an averaging and a lossy compression of everything on GitHub. There's nothing about the current paradigm of "AI" that is going to somehow do better than just rehashing that training set but with the inclusion of various classes of errors.
I think it's better to view it as spicy search rather than any form of intelligence.
Okay I looked over their stuff, a couple thoughts:
I want them to be more clear in their privacy policy about what exactly they can and would reveal for a court order, what their screening process is for those orders, under what conditions they would fight one and if they will reveal anything outside the context of a full court order.
Reason: this is one of your biggest areas of vulnerability when signing up for a phone plan.
The lexipol leaks showed that many police departments use phone information requests so much that they include a set of request forms (typically one for each carrier) in the appendix of their operations manuals. Frequently the forms are the only data request tool in that appendix.
If you happened to have a call with someone who then did something Cool™ and got picked up, expect the detective to have your name and address on a post-it on their desk by the next morning. If you talked to them on some online chat platform they'll send a court order to that platform for your IP then do the same to your carrier to unmask your identity.
Yes, if you were also sufficiently Cool™ they'll start doing more invasive things like directly tracking your phone via tower dumps, but that's a significant escalation in time and effort. If things got Cool™ enough that this is a concern though, it may buy you time to get a new phone if you live in an area dense enough for that to not be immediately identifying.
Also: I suspect the zip code is completely unverifiable so put whatever you want in there, basically pick your favorite sales tax rate.
Points 2 and 3 and just innate to the project, not something that can be fixed in a custom ROM. Point 1 is not something any of those projects choose to fix, you need to either root or use a particular ROM to get around that because of how baked into the network stack those limitations are.
We really need an open source mobile operating system that isn't controlled by tech megacorps.
Android is far too compromised by corporate profit motives.
-
it helps network operators identify tether traffic and prevents it from being hidden by the systems VPN.
-
it facilitates vendor pre installed adware, bloat ware, and malware that can't be uninstalled
-
it facilitates carrier locking to prevent users from switching carriers
Depends on your goals and your threat model. Tails is kinda 80% "I think a TLA will kick down my door or take my computer at the border physically" or you want to use untrusted hardware and 20% "I want to avoid online tracking". If you're worried about online tracking only it might not be the place to start out.