Free Republic

Google's Chrome web browser will soon include a warning that "private" browsing does not prevent users from being tracked, a move that comes months after Google settled a related privacy lawsuit. In December, Google settled a $5 billion privacy lawsuit, which alleged that it spied on people who used Chrome's private browsing — or 'Incognito' — mode. A pre-release version of the browser has been found to include an updated privacy warning that addresses a key piece of evidence in the settled lawsuit — that users "overestimate" the privacy protection features in Chrome. When the change is rolled out, users...

My partners and I have been lifetime data scientists. We own the digital ID of every mobile device/computer in the U.S. and have indexed and archived every IP address in the world. Our extensive experience in big and deep data, including geotracking and geolocation makes our dozens of data companies the top authority for providing data to corporations, law enforcement and U.S. government agencies like the CIA, NSA, DoD, DIA, NGA, NRO, FBI, as well as Interpol and foreign intelligence organizations. There are a number of videos documenting these ghost buses as well as a number of mostly nondescript DOJ...

a report from 404 Media, written by cybersecurity journalist Joseph Cox: In the mid-afternoon one Saturday earlier this month, the target got on the New York subway. I knew what station they entered the subway at and at what specific time. They then entered another station a few hours later. If I had kept monitoring this person, I would have figured out the subway station they often start a journey at, which is near where they live. I would also know what specific time this person may go to the subway each day. During all this monitoring, I wasn't anywhere...

New York officials have announced the end of the state’s COVID-19 vaccine passport app, as demand has dried up for the pandemic-era relic that critics call discriminatory. The plug will be pulled on the Excelsior Pass Plus (EPP) on July 28, amid plummeting demand for access to digital test and vaccine records and as the COVID-19 public health emergency has ended. First launched in 2021, the app costs New York state around $200,000 per month to maintain, according to the Times Union of Albany. The app stored a person’s COVID-19 vaccination status and was used to demonstrate compliance with vaccine...

The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal. Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois. Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation,...

Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, intrepid journalists at The Epoch Times have uncovered a previously secret CDC program to tag and track unvaxxed and “undervaccinated” (apparently meaning people who took one or more shots but did not get their so-called “boosters”) U.S. citizens. Via The Epoch Times (emphasis added): Medical codes introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic to show when people are unvaccinated or undervaccinated for COVID-19 are being used to track people, the top U.S. public health agency has confirmed.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made the confirmation in emails that The Epoch Times obtained...

Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, intrepid journalists at The Epoch Times have uncovered a previously secret CDC program to tag and track unvaxxed and “undervaccinated” (apparently meaning people who took one or more shots but did not get their so-called “boosters”) U.S. citizens. Via The Epoch Times (emphasis added):Medical codes introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic to show when people are unvaccinated or undervaccinated for COVID-19 are being used to track people, the top U.S. public health agency has confirmed.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made the confirmation in emails that The Epoch Times obtained through...

It’s no secret anymore. Nearly everything you do online is tracked or recorded and used to learn more about you. Many of your data points ends up on creepy people search sites. You’ll be shocked to find your full name, address, relatives, phone number, and more. Here’s a list of sites where you can opt out of this invasion of privacy. On your phone, apps are likely watching — and reporting — more than you realize. Take back control with just a few minutes in your settings. Navigation apps use your phone’s GPS location to determine exactly where you are....

The federal government has been using Americans’ income and gun purchases to conduct warrantless tracking and deny Second Amendment rights. Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) gave salary estimates to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the reason to have people’s firearms purchases monitored.Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Gun Owners of America (GOA), told The Epoch Times that the ATF’s activities “monitoring innocent people” is a serious problem. “Congress needs to rein in this rogue agency by either exercising oversight over it or abolishing the unconstitutional agency altogether,” said Pratt.These revelations come from...

Credit card companies have a plan in place that will, to some degree, allow the tracking of gun and ammo sales. This was a move politicians pushed for, despite absolutely no one being able to actually show us how it will reduce mass shootings, violent crime, or anything else. This is simply the latest step the financial industry has taken to hurt the firearm industry. A lot of people are anything but keen on seeing something like this in place. In Florida, a bill will seek to implement a $10,000 fine on each instance of a company tracking the sales...

"Trader Joe's will continue to hire on-site staff as the company believes its employees are more important than the glitz and the glamour of self-checkout. “The bottom line here is that our people remain our most valued resource," Tara Miller, Trader Joe's vice president of marketing, said on the Inside Trader Joe's podcast. “While other retailers were cutting staff and adding things like self-checkout, curbside pickup, and outsourcing delivery options, we were hiring more crew, and we continue to do that.” She added: "Our crew will be in our stores to help you find your next favorite product, just as...

The US military and intelligence community had been tracking the Chinese spy balloon since it launched from a base on Hainan Island near the southern coast of China — and officials are looking into the possibility that it may have drifted off course, according to a report. US officials told the Washington Post on Tuesday that the balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina earlier this month had been monitored for nearly a week before it penetrated US airspace, and that it initially appeared that the surveillance device was heading toward Guam before it took an unexpected turn...

State Treasurer Riley Moore today announced the introduction of legislation he proposed to lawmakers prohibiting the use of credit and debit card transactions to surveil lawful gun and ammunition purchases in West Virginia. House Bill 2004, The Second Amendment Financial Privacy Act, would prohibit financial institutions from using credit card merchant category codes assigned to firearm and ammunition retailers to discriminate against West Virginians’ constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms or enable government agencies to track lawful gun and ammunition purchases. “Woke activists in Congress and their allies on Wall Street continue to find new ways to undermine our freedoms...

Police said they began tracking and surveilling Kohberger around Christmas and stayed on him for four days when they spotted the white Hyundai Elantra they believed was connected to the murders. Investigators said Kohberger drove cross-country in the car to his parents home in Albrightsville, Pennsylvania. His car was confirmed to be at the Pennsylvania home, and officials worked quickly to obtain a warrant for his arrest, law enforcement sources told CNN. Along with the surprised bar owner, students who attended Washington State University with Kohberger said they were shocked to learn that the quiet man in their classroom was...

ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit team also planned to collect TikTok data about the location of a U.S. citizen who had never had an employment relationship with the company...the plan was for a Beijing-based ByteDance team to obtain location data from U.S. users’ devices. TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said that TikTok collects approximate location information based on users’ IP addresses to “among other things...detect and prevent fraud and inauthentic behavior." ByteDance's Internal Audit team was...

Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press. Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company. Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC,...

"Not being satisfied with paying a monthly fee to be tracked wherever they go and monitored in all of their communications (which is exactly what that cellphone next to you has done since you got it) people are now being gaslighted into thinking that putting a tiny computer chip into their own body surgically is a good thing to do despite the known evil that is the World Economic Forum (WEF) being the ones to suggest it. And as WEF knows most Western adults will shun the idiocy of that, they are positioning their plot as a safety measure for...

“You need to do this iPhone hack in case your phone gets stolen because mine did last night, and I actually got it back,” Katrina says. She adds that she learned the hack from @reviewingtech on Instagram. “First step go to Face ID and Passcode, you want to toggle off Control Center and USB Accessories,” Audrey explains. “Toggle on Location Services, Find my iPhone, and make sure to toggle on all three of these [she’s referring to Find my iPhone, Find my Network, and Send Last Location].” This process requires the user to sign into any other iOS device with...

Statistics Norway wants to receive several million daily receipts from food stores, signalling a new era in state data collection. Privacy advocates and the supermarkets themselves are unhappy. People living in Norway are used to big government. But the latest news coming out of Oslo is a surprising new step down the road of data collection that not everyone is happy with. Statistics Norway (SSB) is the state-owned entity responsible for collecting, producing and communicating statistics related to the economy, population and society at national, regional and local levels. Because everything about an individual living in Norway is linked to...

Robert Mueller says he was able to pinpoint security company executive Erik Prince’s precise location for several hours in January 2017 by matching his mobile phone signal to a cell site near Trump Tower in New York City. The special counsel’s report discloses the use of this investigative technique, by which police determine a suspect’s location via a cellphone’s GPS signal. The Prince narrative is one instance in unredacted sections of the report in which Mr. Mueller’s team explicitly discloses cellphone tracking. It raises the question of whether the FBI applied the process to other investigative subjects — a phone’s...