The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring

[arotrios@lemmy.world]

It apparently scrapes everything on the public feed. So when I subscribed to users on Mastodon server A from Wordpress, DMs from Mastodon server A going to Mastodon server B became visible.

I had a separate account on Mastodon server A to confirm that I couldn't see these DMs as Mastodon user on server A, and that the Wordpress scrape was grabbing messages normally not meant for public view.

This was using the ActivityPub plugin for Wordpress about six months ago.

[drascus@sh.itjust.works]

Probably just whatever the public metadata is.

[drascus@sh.itjust.works]

Duckduckgo is not the problem. They are using publicly scrapable information. So for instance if they have fingerprinted your device they see you go to duckduckgo, then they see you access a site about buying guns, it becomes trivial to determine what you searched for. They would not have direct access to what you search on duckduckgo and duckduckgo is not giving them access. They are using various methods to collect data based on habits. You can use literally any service you want and they could do the same thing.

[everymuffinisnowencrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

Lol yeah I heard about that. Apparently they also preemptively made post-quantum encryption illegal? Yeah, I don't like the US, but I'm not sure I'd wanna live in Sweden, that's for sure.

[everymuffinisnowencrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

Oof, yeah I forgot about the metadata... What you say is certainly true and is worrisome.

Plus, most people who use email don't use encrypted email so even if they can't get a transcript of a conversation from my account, they can certainly get everything from the other account if they also scrape that platform.

[everymuffinisnowencrypted@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

Oh shit.

Well that clears things up. Thanks for the explanation. thumbs-up

[captainautism@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Reddit is there.

[rvtv95xbeo@sh.itjust.works]

If that's true, why bother "monitoring" a search engine? This whole list screams of somebody who knows nothing about tech put out a vague RFP and a contractor pulled a list of "top sites" and used it to justify an egregious proposal cost.

DOGE, if you're looking for waste and fraud, perhaps here's a good source.

[arotrios@lemmy.world]

Thank you sir - I've posted an edit with a credit to your astute eye.

[plz1@lemmy.world]

What are they monitoring on Amazon, the fake reviews?

[euphoma@lemmy.ml]

Why tf is PGP, tesseract ocr, and deepl on this list. Deepl is literally just a machine translation service, users don't post onto it. tesseract ocr is a downloadable software for ocr. PGP is encryption.

[drascus@sh.itjust.works]

They do it all to build up a huge web of interconnected data points. Duckduckgo itself they might take as evidence that someone is trying to hide something. Then the government goes to a FISA court and gets permission to have other tech companies hand over all your data. Its not any one site its the picture that can be gleamed from all the data available across all the sites.

[drascus@sh.itjust.works]

Likely every product any amazon customer ever views. They could potentially even figure out which things you buy. But you can get a pretty clear picture of someone's personality and interests if you know everything they search for.

[plz1@lemmy.world]

How would they find that info from the outside, though? Or are you saying they are hooked into Amazon's internal data harvesting ecosystem?

[Guest]

Vine? Didn’t that close down back in 2016?

[drascus@sh.itjust.works]

Not really necessary people make DNS requests which are pretty easy to track if you know what URL was requested that will be the exact product. This can all be done by man in the middle and monitoring network traffic. But even that is sort of unnecessary. They could very possibly have contracts with ISPs or other network operators some of that is likely just secret and they dont disclose it.