TY I did notice you had put the source originally after I posted but that is still not everyone IMO. I also am very reluctant to believe someone like Snowden.
This is a true story of mine from a month ago:
Recently, I found a Garmin GPS watch at a lake near my home. The watch was muddy and the power did not come on but it was in good shape. I ordered a charger for it and charged the watch. Then I downloaded the Garmin program off their website and synced the watch to the newly downloaded program on my computer.
In the workout calendar history of the watch was the GPS path on a Google map for all the places this person had run in 2019. They had been in California - six cities, Nevada, Florida, and London. This person had run ½ marathons and skied, so I knew they were quite athletic and they traveled. One of the places this person commonly initiated and ended runs was on a street a few miles from the lake where I found the watch. I then checked Spokeo, an on-line people search application.
In Spokeo, I could enter an address and see who the residents were in the homes. I entered two addresses in Spokeo for the two houses closest to the spot where the GPS map showed this runner started their runs from and got a couple of names. Spokeo also shows a picture if there is one matched from an on-line social media site like Facebook that they can link to the person.
The second address searched returned a picture of a man who was finishing a marathon. This man had parent’s that lived in Florida. Spokeo also provides emails and phone numbers so I called and left a message for the guy. He called me back and was happy that I had found his watch. He had lost the watch while wake boarding in July.
It took about five minutes to identify this stranger once I could view the watch data.
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Spokeo has changed their user interface and functionality from a five or so years ago. They removed the easy to view relationship map. They removed the user id search function. They reduced the social media search returns. Basically, they gutted and reduced the quality of the product available to the public. I'm sure that functionality is still available for use by the government and the private sector along with other integrated personal data.
Snowden risked his life to expose Constitutional privacy violations on a massive scale. His information forced Congress to pass laws that limit the mass collection of our data. More protections need to be put in place, but at least the American public were aware of the programs and lies made by NSA and CIA officials.
I love using data for good like returning a watch and finding criminals but that same data can be used to violate people's privacy. Once computers are networked like they are on the internet, it is quite easy for them to be compromised and remotely controlled and accessed. All data that streams to or from your computer on-line must go through servers. At any point during it's path to or from your device, the data can be intercepted and stored. Once a system is accessed, anything on it can be viewed unless it is encrypted, which very few people bother to do.
I tend to believe Snowden.
