Covid19: US FBI Launches Physical Fitness Spy Tracking App, GoogleCIA Flexes FitBit, Surveillance Valley on Virus

[grarpamp]

https://twitter.com/EFF/status/1243335750696833024
The FBI is prompting you to download a home workout app during the
quarantine. Looks like it's not free of third party analytics
libraries: mobile company AppCelerator can tell when you're using the
app, and what screen you're on.

https://twitter.com/FBI/status/1242058787160313857
#MondayMotivation Are you looking for tips for indoor workouts?
Download the #FBI’s Physical Fitness Test app to learn proper form for
exercises you can do at home like pushups and situps.
http://ow.ly/6y3f50yQeHj


https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/google-fitbit-merger-would-cement-googles-data-empire
https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
Yasha Levine, “Surveillance Valley has put a billion bugs in a billion
pockets,” Pando Daily, 7 February 2014, archive.today/TA7sq


https://theintercept.com/2017/11/24/staggering-variety-of-clandestine-trackers-found-in-popular-android-apps/
Researchers at Yale Privacy Lab and French nonprofit Exodus Privacy
have documented the proliferation of tracking software on smartphones,
finding that weather, flashlight, ride-sharing, and dating apps, among
others, are infested with dozens of different types of trackers
collecting vast amounts of information to better target advertising.
Exodus security researchers identified 44 trackers in more than 300
apps for Google’s Android smartphone operating system. The apps,
collectively, have been downloaded billions of times. Yale Privacy
Lab, within the university’s law school, is working to replicate the
Exodus findings and has already released reports on 25 of the
trackers.
Yale Privacy Lab researchers have only been able to analyze Android
apps but believe many of the trackers also exist on iOS, since
companies often distribute for both platforms. To find trackers, the
Exodus researchers built a custom auditing platform for Android apps,
which searched through the apps for digital “signatures” distilled
from known trackers. A signature might be a telltale set of keywords
or string of bytes found in an app file, or a mathematically derived
“hash” summary of the file.
The findings underscore the pervasiveness of tracking despite a
permissions system on Android that supposedly puts users in control of
their own data. They also highlight how a large and varied set of
firms are working to enable tracking.