Social engineering. The more information they have about you, the easier you are to immitate.
The threat isn’t in any one piece of information about you; it’s in the corpus of knowledge, the profile they can build. Your tastes in music - at the granularity of not only what you listen to, but how much, and at what times - can help narrow down:
how old you are
where (in the world, and maybe to the time zone) you live
your mother tongue
probably your socio-economic status
These are just the things I can tyink of off the top of my head, and I’m not in infosec.
There’s really no reason why we had to be in a war in Iraq. Afghanistan… yeah, probably not there, either, especially given how intimately we understood how well they had been trained at guerilla warfare against foreign invaders.
Although, that’s not guite accurate; there were reasons, they were just serving different, less publically recognized, purposes. Much like Netanyahu’s war.
I’m starting to like Thumb Key. It may have the hardest learning curve I’ve ever seen, but it’s highly configurable, the developer is super active, and it has a ton of nicely implemented features. I feel as if it’ll be like vim: hard to get up to speed on, but once the muscle memory takes hold, I’ll be extremely productive with it.
Years ago, I worked for a company that provided phone location for emergency services (fire, police, medical) to the big 3 cellular companies in the US. It required cell providers to install special hardware; back then, GPS was less ubiquitous, but it (still) suffers from accuracy in urban environments; it doesn’t take much to block GPS signals. Also, you don’t need access to anything more than the service provider’s logs to do trilateration; it’s harder to get GPS data from a phone without having software on the phone. In any case, Google pioneered getting around that by mapping wifi signals and supplementing poor GPS with trilateration, and it was good enough. Even back then, our lunch was being eaten by the cost of our systems, and work-arounds like wifi mapping.
Anyway, fast forward a decade and I’m working for a company that provides emergency support for customers who are traveling, and we’re looking at ways to locate customers’ business phones to provide relevant notifications. One of the issues was that there are places in the world where data connections are not great, and it was not acceptable for us to just ignore clients without data connections. One of the things we explored was called zero-length SMS. It’s what it sounds like: an SMS message with zero-length does not alert the phone, but it does cause a ping to the phone. It was an idea that didn’t pan out, but that’s not relevant.
Cell phones have a lot of power-saving algorithms that try to reduce the amount of chatter – both to reduce load on cell towers, but because all that cellular traffic is battery-intensive. So, if you’re a government trying to track a phone, and you’re working with a cell provider, and you don’t have a backdoor in the phone, then you will be able to see which cell tower the phone last spoke with, but that probably won’t give you very good location data and it may not update frequently. This is especially true in rural environments, where there’s low density and a single cell tower might have a service radius of 3 miles – that’s a lot of area.
If you’re tracking someone by phone, a normal cell connection may not be granular enough. Sending SMSes to a phone can force the phone to ping the tower and give you more data points about where the phone may be, how it’s moving, and so on.If you’re lucky, you can get pings from multiple towers, which might allow you to trilaterate to within a dozen meters.
Push notifications use data, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some of that going on, too. It says “through Apple and Google’s servers” which means they’re talking about the push notification servers and not the phones. Android phones are constantly sending telemetry back to Google, so if that is what they’re doing sending push notifications is probably more useful to them for Apple phones.
The article is light on details, but that’d be my guess. Forcing traffic to get more frequent cell tower pings and more data points for trilateration.
If you’re trying to make a statement about Palestinian sympathizers, you’re off the mark. Few people are defending Hamas’ attacks, but there are a lot of people criticizing Israel’s war crimes.