Saturday, January 26, 2019

Privacy revolution again

So, anyway, I won’t mention Sandra’s name, but a friend of mine, who used to be a security geek, but is now a goat farmer, pinged me with a scary story yesterday.

She got a robo call from PayPal, advertising something, which might be a bit annoying, but that’s not scary.

As you generally do, with an unrecognized number, she let it go to voice mail, and the message asked her to call back a different number. Nothing entirely amazing there.

But here’s the scary bit. The spoofed number pretended to be from a really small town in PA, that she had only ever been to once before... and that was _earlier that day_

Amazing coincidence, right?

Problem is, those of us in the security biz don’t tend to like coincidences, so the alternative is that something was tracking her.

She checked her settings for PayPal, but it showed that it only tracked her while using the app, and as far as she knew, she was not using the app.

So now we are left to wonder ... is something else selling its tracking data?

At this point, we simply don’t know, but there are certainly lots of apps (it is an iPhone) that are capable of tracking you all the time.

It’s either an amazing coincidence, or the Privacy Revolution in action.

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