the surveillance state

The reports say that this behavior began in 2016, when Ring founder Jamie Siminoff moved the company’s efforts from San Francisco to Ukraine to save money. Sources tell The Information that for months after the Ukraine office was opened, videos were frequently transmitted without encryption. In addition, the company provided its R&D team in Ukraine with virtually unrestricted access to a folder on the company’s Amazon’s S3 cloud storage instance containing every Ring customer video.

Ring’s Ukraine team was granted access to customer videos as a manual prop-up for underperforming AI. “Data operators” manually tagged and labeled objects in videos — like vehicles and people — in efforts to train the software’s object recognition. This team, another source tells The Intercept, watched footage from both outdoor and indoor cameras, showed other employees footage, and annotated actions like “kissing, firing guns, and stealing.”

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/10/18177305/ring-employees-unencrypted-customer-video-amazon

https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/ring-ceo-jamie-siminoff-unusual-road-to-success/

T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.

at least one company, called Microbilt, is selling phone geolocation services with little oversight to a spread of different private industries, ranging from car salesmen and property managers to bail bondsmen and bounty hunters, according to sources familiar with the company’s products and company documents obtained by Motherboard. Compounding that already highly questionable business practice, this spying capability is also being resold to others on the black market who are not licensed by the company to use it, including me, seemingly without Microbilt’s knowledge.

Motherboard’s investigation shows just how exposed mobile networks and the data they generate are, leaving them open to surveillance by ordinary citizens, stalkers, and criminals, and comes as media and policy makers are paying more attention than ever to how location and other sensitive data is collected and sold.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunter-300-dollars-located-phone-microbilt-zumigo-tmobile