Il faut lire (en anglais) l’incroyable enquête du New York Times, écrite par deux journalistes Stuart A. Thompson et Charlie Warzel. Incroyable, non pas parce que l’on apprend que notre téléphone nous géolocalise, ça on le savait… Incroyable, plutôt, par la qualité de l’enquête, qui démontre que quelques sociétés peuvent compiler, exploiter, analyser tous les mouvement des détenteurs de téléphone, ses déplacements, ses habitudes, ses travers, … Et ces sociétés ne sont pas les GAFAM ! Surprise …
Dans la même veine on pourra lire aussi l’étude du professeur Schmidt de l’université Vanderbildt « Ce que Google collecte » (traduit de l’anglais par Framasoft ;-).
Solutions alternatives
Avant de vous laisser continuer la lecture ci-dessous, je précise qu’il existe des solutions alternatives. J’ai opté récemment pour un téléphone avec un système d’exploitation indépendant /e/. Créé par Gael Duval (qui est intervenu récemment au Club IES), ce téléphone contient une version Android (base linux) totalement dégooglisée. J’en parlerai prochainement.
Je copie colle ci-dessous quelques extraits (vu la taille de l’article, on peut considérer que c’est un « extrait pertinent » qui respecte le droit de la copie 😉 L’étude est diffusée en plusieurs articles :
1er partie : Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy.
2eme partie : Freaked Out? 3 Steps to Protect Your Phone.
3eme partie : How to Track President Trump.
4eme partie : How it works.
Jérôme Bondu
Location data company
The data reviewed by Times Opinion didn’t come from a telecom or giant tech company, nor did it come from a governmental surveillance operation. It originated from a location data company, one of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software slipped onto mobile phone apps. You’ve probably never heard of most of the companies — and yet to anyone who has access to this data, your life is an open book. They can see the places you go every moment of the day, whom you meet with or spend the night with, where you pray, whether you visit a methadone clinic, a psychiatrist’s office or a massage parlor.
(…)
Even still, this file represents just a small slice of what’s collected and sold every day by the location tracking industry — surveillance so omnipresent in our digital lives that it now seems impossible for anyone to avoid.
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Deceptive techniques
In this and subsequent articles we’ll reveal what we’ve found and why it has so shaken us. We’ll ask you to consider the national security risks the existence of this kind of data creates and the specter of what such precise, always-on human tracking might mean in the hands of corporations and the government. We’ll also look at legal and ethical justifications that companies rely on to collect our precise locations and the deceptive techniques they use to lull us into sharing it.
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The companies that collect all this information on your movements justify their business on the basis of three claims: People consent to be tracked, the data is anonymous and the data is secure.
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A completely false claim
Describing location data as anonymous is “a completely false claim” that has been debunked in multiple studies, Paul Ohm, a law professor and privacy researcher at the Georgetown University Law Center, told us. “Really precise, longitudinal geolocation information is absolutely impossible to anonymize.”
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The data set is large enough that it surely points to scandal and crime but our purpose wasn’t to dig up dirt. We wanted to document the risk of underregulated surveillance.
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That data can then be resold, copied, pirated and abused. There’s no way you can ever retrieve it.
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