How to anonymise Phone Number?

[holisti]

I don't border about the procedure.

Originally Posted by icesauna

How do they track?

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https://www.theglobeandmail.com/tech...ticle28865055/



Hundreds of millions of Android smartphone users have downloaded photo-collage, karaoke and video-chat apps that send location data and other identifying details back to servers in China, a new report has found.

The information is collected by Chinese search and advertising engine giant Baidu, which collects users' GPS co-ordinates, names of nearby wireless networks and a unique device number that can be used to identify a person's phone, according to findings contained in a new report from The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.

That information is stored on Baidu servers. The company says it gives Chinese authorities access to its data in accordance with local laws.

But placing such material in government hands could provide a detailed picture of a person's movements and contacts, potentially threatening those who anger the Chinese state, such as human rights campaigners or democracy activists, said Ronald Deibert, the lab's director.

"That is obviously the ultimate and most serious risk," he said.

"The collection of all that fine-grained, detailed information is either poor engineering choices, or this is surveillance by design," he said. And, he added, "don't forget – none of that data disappears."

Baidu does not collect such information from Apple devices. But disclosure of the Chinese company's tracking comes as the iPhone maker faces off against the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has demanded Apple help crack the lock on an iPhone used by San Bernardino mass shooting suspect Syed Farook.

Mr. Deibert said Baidu's practices illuminate the privacy battle at the heart of that dispute.

"It's an important public policy threshold now that I think is being crossed," he said.

"We're building a kind of digital house of cards here, and I don't think people fully appreciate just how much information is being given away as part of our daily routine."

The Baidu information tracking is built into the Beijing company's Web browser for Android, as well as apps that use the software development kit for its Baidu Mobile Tongji, which allows Android app makers to track analytical data. Thousands of apps use the service, some distributed worldwide through the Google Play store.

One, ES File Explorer File Manager, claims more than 300 million users and can be used in more than 30 languages.

A Windows Web browser made by Baidu went further, tracking hard drive serial numbers and Web browsing histories – but only a tiny number of users have that browser.

When The Citizen Lab first began looking at the Baidu data collection, it discovered that much of the information was transmitted either without encryption, or in ways that could easily be decrypted.

Mr. Deibert's team sent its findings to Baidu in late November, and the company quickly responded, updating its Android Web browser to what spokesman Kaiser Kuo called "the absolute strictest standards, to basically undecipherable encryption." That work is "basically done," Mr. Kuo said Wednesday.

Encryption on the Mobile Tongji software development kit was also upgraded in December, he said, although Mr. Deibert said checks by his team a week ago found "no fixes."

Baidu has not, however, changed the type of information it stockpiles.

"As far as what data is used, there are perfectly good reasons for developers to need to know a lot of stuff – it's for them to be able to provide a better user experience," Mr. Kuo said. In China, he said, it's also "quite standard" to harvest the 15-digit International Mobile Station Equipment Identity, a unique number that can pinpoint a particular smartphone no matter what apps or online accounts a person uses.

"We don't collect more than most people," Mr. Kuo said.

But one Chinese marketing group, in an online post made in 2013, pointed to Baidu's information collection as one reason to use it, saying "Baidu tracks each individual user, allowing you to see all the pages they visited," a capability Google does not provide.

Google's own analytics software bans the uploading of information that can "personally identify an individual … or data that permanently identifies a particular device."

The Baidu-made software appears to be "sending many critical bits of data," said Nate Lawson, founder of app analytics firm SourceDNA. Developers might want some of that information to spot coding problems. "But the result for end users is a loss of privacy," he said.

The Baidu revelations come amid the global rise of Chinese Internet giants, who are headquartered in a country that severely censors and monitors its online space.

Companies in China, South Korea and Vietnam are behind the most popular apps using the Baidu software. None replied to e-mails sent by The Globe and Mail.

The erosion of smartphone privacy has grown into a major concern for companies and governments whose employee devices can siphon off information that may be sensitive or classified.

On Tuesday, San Francisco-based Appthority released a report that found 100 per cent of the most common apps on corporate smartphones "have data leakage and privacy invasive behaviours." Some smartphone apps go far beyond the Baidu software, exporting text messages, address books and calendar information. Advertisers seeking to profile buyers can profit from this information, but so can scammers and intelligence agencies.

China now ranks among the top national destinations for such transmissions, said Domingo Guerra, president of Appthority, which has analyzed over 3.5 million mobile apps.

Baidu calls the data it obtains "anonymous identifiers," but in other countries it is classified as "personally identifiable information," Mr. Guerra said.

Smartphone apps, often a Frankenstein mix of different software elements from different places – some to push ads, some to report program crashes – have created thorny transnational problems, he said.

"It's really a new frontier, in the sense that a lot of the privacy laws and Internet privacy laws that we have don't necessarily apply to mobile very well," Mr. Guerra said.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemath...third-parties/


https://theconversation.com/7-in-10-...services-72404





Our mobile phones can reveal a lot about ourselves: where we live and work; who our family, friends and acquaintances are; how (and even what) we communicate with them; and our personal habits. With all the information stored on them, it isn’t surprising that mobile device users take steps to protect their privacy, like using PINs or passcodes to unlock their phones.

The research that we and our colleagues are doing identifies and explores a significant threat that most people miss: More than 70 percent of smartphone apps are reporting personal data to third-party tracking companies like Google Analytics, the Facebook Graph API or Crashlytics.

When people install a new Android or iOS app, it asks the user’s permission before accessing personal information. Generally speaking, this is positive. And some of the information these apps are collecting are necessary for them to work properly: A map app wouldn’t be nearly as useful if it couldn’t use GPS data to get a location.

But once an app has permission to collect that information, it can share your data with anyone the app’s developer wants to – letting third-party companies track where you are, how fast you’re moving and what you’re doing.
The help, and hazard, of code libraries

An app doesn’t just collect data to use on the phone itself. Mapping apps, for example, send your location to a server run by the app’s developer to calculate directions from where you are to a desired destination.

The app can send data elsewhere, too. As with websites, many mobile apps are written by combining various functions, precoded by other developers and companies, in what are called third-party libraries. These libraries help developers track user engagement, connect with social media and earn money by displaying ads and other features, without having to write them from scratch.

However, in addition to their valuable help, most libraries also collect sensitive data and send it to their online servers – or to another company altogether. Successful library authors may be able to develop detailed digital profiles of users. For example, a person might give one app permission to know their location, and another app access to their contacts. These are initially separate permissions, one to each app. But if both apps used the same third-party library and shared different pieces of information, the library’s developer could link the pieces together.

Users would never know, because apps aren’t required to tell users what software libraries they use. And only very few apps make public their policies on user privacy; if they do, it’s usually in long legal documents a regular person won’t read, much less understand.
Developing Lumen

Our research seeks to reveal how much data are potentially being collected without users’ knowledge, and to give users more control over their data. To get a picture of what data are being collected and transmitted from people’s smartphones, we developed a free Android app of our own, called the Lumen Privacy Monitor. It analyzes the traffic apps send out, to report which applications and online services actively harvest personal data.

Because Lumen is about transparency, a phone user can see the information installed apps collect in real time and with whom they share these data. We try to show the details of apps’ hidden behavior in an easy-to-understand way. It’s about research, too, so we ask users if they’ll allow us to collect some data about what Lumen observes their apps are doing – but that doesn’t include any personal or privacy-sensitive data. This unique access to data allows us to study how mobile apps collect users’ personal data and with whom they share data at an unprecedented scale.

In particular, Lumen keeps track of which apps are running on users’ devices, whether they are sending privacy-sensitive data out of the phone, what internet sites they send data to, the network protocol they use and what types of personal information each app sends to each site. Lumen analyzes apps traffic locally on the device, and anonymizes these data before sending them to us for study: If Google Maps registers a user’s GPS location and sends that specific address to maps.google.com, Lumen tells us, “Google Maps got a GPS location and sent it to maps.google.com” – not where that person actually is.
Trackers are everywhere
Lumen’s user interface, showing the data leakages and their privacy risks, found for a mobile Android game called ‘Odd Socks.’ ICSI, CC BY-ND

More than 1,600 people who have used Lumen since October 2015 allowed us to analyze more than 5,000 apps. We discovered 598 internet sites likely to be tracking users for advertising purposes, including social media services like Facebook, large internet companies like Google and Yahoo, and online marketing companies under the umbrella of internet service providers like Verizon Wireless.
Lumen’s explanation of a leak of a device’s Android ID. ICSI, CC BY-ND

We found that more than 70 percent of the apps we studied connected to at least one tracker, and 15 percent of them connected to five or more trackers. One in every four trackers harvested at least one unique device identifier, such as the phone number or its device-specific unique 15-digit IMEI number. Unique identifiers are crucial for online tracking services because they can connect different types of personal data provided by different apps to a single person or device. Most users, even privacy-savvy ones, are unaware of those hidden practices.
More than just a mobile problem

Tracking users on their mobile devices is just part of a larger problem. More than half of the app-trackers we identified also track users through websites. Thanks to this technique, called “cross-device” tracking, these services can build a much more complete profile of your online persona.

And individual tracking sites are not necessarily independent of others. Some of them are owned by the same corporate entity – and others could be swallowed up in future mergers. For example, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, owns several of the tracking domains that we studied, including Google Analytics, DoubleClick or AdMob, and through them collects data from more than 48 percent of the apps we studied.
Data transfers observed between locations of Lumen users (left) and third-party server locations (right). Traffic frequently crosses international boundaries. ICSI, CC BY-ND

Users’ online identities are not protected by their home country’s laws. We found data being shipped across national borders, often ending up in countries with questionable privacy laws. More than 60 percent of connections to tracking sites are made to servers in the U.S., U.K., France, Singapore, China and South Korea – six countries that have deployed mass surveillance technologies. Government agencies in those places could potentially have access to these data, even if the users are in countries with stronger privacy laws such as Germany, Switzerland or Spain.
Connecting a device’s MAC address to a physical address (belonging to ICSI) using Wigle. ICSI, CC BY-ND

Even more disturbingly, we have observed trackers in apps targeted to children. By testing 111 kids’ apps in our lab, we observed that 11 of them leaked a unique identifier, the MAC address, of the Wi-Fi router it was connected to. This is a problem, because it is easy to search online for physical locations associated with particular MAC addresses. Collecting private information about children, including their location, accounts and other unique identifiers, potentially violates the Federal Trade Commission’s rules protecting children’s privacy.
Just a small look

Although our data include many of the most popular Android apps, it is a small sample of users and apps, and therefore likely a small set of all possible trackers. Our findings may be merely scratching the surface of what is likely to be a much larger problem that spans across regulatory jurisdictions, devices and platforms.

It’s hard to know what users might do about this. Blocking sensitive information from leaving the phone may impair app performance or user experience: An app may refuse to function if it cannot load ads. Actually, blocking ads hurts app developers by denying them a source of revenue to support their work on apps, which are usually free to users.

If people were more willing to pay developers for apps, that may help, though it’s not a complete solution. We found that while paid apps tend to contact fewer tracking sites, they still do track users and connect with third-party tracking services.

Transparency, education and strong regulatory frameworks are the key. Users need to know what information about them is being collected, by whom, and what it’s being used for. Only then can we as a society decide what privacy protections are appropriate, and put them in place. Our findings, and those of many other researchers, can help turn the tables and track the trackers themselves.

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/...a-1042883.html

One day in September 1987, the phone rang at the headquarters of the Volkspolizei, East Germany's police force, in the town of Döbeln, not far from Dresden. On the other end of the line was the voice of an unknown man.

"Good evening. I have some information for you. Grab a pen!"
"I'm listening."
"Ms. Marianne Schneider is traveling on Wednesday, Sept. 14, to West Berlin for a visit. She doesn't intend to return."
"And who are you?"
Silence.
"You would like to remain anonymous?"
"Yes."
"What is the basis for your information?"
"She said so, to her closest friends."

Then, the mysterious caller hung up. And Marianne Schneider* had a problem. Officials immediately revoked her travel permit and began monitoring her phone and mail in addition to questioning her neighbors and friends.

This story is one of spies and informers of the kind that were largely ignored by historians of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) until recently -- because they were spies and informers that were not connected to the Stasi, as East Germany's feared Ministry for State Security was popularly known. Instead, they were totally normal citizens of East Germany who betrayed others: neighbors reporting on neighbors, schoolchildren informing on classmates, university students passing along information on other students, managers spying on employees and Communist bosses denouncing party members.

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[spitfire71]

Everything can be traced as technology is so advanced these days. Maybe if you buy the card off a bangla.

[treasurehuntin]

Führer will be so happy.
Everything is becoming fascist.

[treasurehuntin]

[treasurehuntin]

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https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriq...igital_tattoos

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http://technocracy.studio/e/total-su...t-be-a-victim/

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[matsue]

Originally Posted by sammyboyfor

Not familiar with Whatsapp but I know that with Telegram all the service provider needs to reveal is a username and you can contact them via username too.

For example you can contact me via Telegram via @sammyboyfor. If you provide a username I can contact you too. No phone numbers need to be revealed. All you will see in my profile is my username.

Does whatsapp have a similar feature?

Whatsapp need phone number using contacts in phone storage.

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If you got a number saved in your contact, the certain person will show up base on the name you save it as in WA and Telegram.


you can change telegram username but once you message people, that people can always check out your latest username like carouhell.

[hwahee]

Originally Posted by treasurehuntin

Their looks damn scary!