Why, would you look at that - apparently surveillance is fine and dandy, as long as it's the US doing it. Fucking hypocrites.
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The article LITERALLY says the opposite
Someone with enough reading comprehension to take that tone would have understood it was criticism of the federal government's hypocrisy and that critics complaining is not the same thing as a law or the courts agreeing.
Jokes on you I'm already on the DoD blacklist because I played War Thunder and got spammed with 40 year old "classified" NATOPs by the forums.
“But sir, downloading viewings for ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ could blow up the entire Internet!”
"Why bother? By now everyone on the planet has already seen it twice."
"You worry too much son, Google already responded to the subpoena with a link to the data, so go get it! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The kind of things why I use NewPipe..
I dont think newpipe would protect from this since it still contacts the yt servers to pull the video. Peertube or a VPN would stop this though.
I just found out that Lemmy is not allowing (or has rate-limited, or whatever) VPN connections to post or react.
Not a fan of that at all.
Edit: it's my instance being on Cloudflare, not Lemmy as a whole. My mistake.
Could be your instance. World is behind cloudflare after all.
World and NordVPN. Recommend another instance?
The instance my account is on, dbzer0, was set up by a former mod of the piracy subreddit. Can't say for certain, but I'd expect that VPNs would work with it. The admin really seems to know his shit.
VPNs protect your from geting caught torrenting, but it cant protect you from the US-goverment.
First of all most of the advertized VPN's are Honeypots and/or back/bugdoored by the NSA.
And even if they where not...so much of the internet runs on servers/services/isp's that are related to american companys that Timing attacks are possibe (for example your ISP logs and shared your encrypted traffic and the NSA then compares Timing patterns of requests with other services).
Right, but if Google is collecting your IP address to give to the government, then using a VPN would put another step in their path, and they would have to go to the VPN provider to try to figure out who it was.As long as that VPN provider is in another country like proton VPN and does not keep logs Then there's a good chance that they won't know who it was that requested the YouTube video
Well... the part they quoted is a little misleading.
The two situations they talked about at least on the face of it were:
- An undercover agent was in contact with someone, and sent them a link to something in the expectation they'd click it and then that undercover agent could track down what was the IP/identity of the person who clicked the link. Pretty standard stuff. The only weird part is that it was a stock Youtube link and they asked Google to be involved to give them identifying information after (and that for whatever reason there were 30,000 people who watched the video and they asked for the info about all 30,000).
- Law enforcement got a bomb threat, then they learned that there had been a livestream of them while they were looking for the bomb. That doesn't automatically mean anything about the person who was livestreaming (maybe they just saw something exciting happening?), but wanting to talk with that person makes 100% sense to me.
So, to me both of those seem pretty reasonable. But of course the on-the-face-of-it explanation for #1 doesn't completely make sense for a couple of different reasons. But I wouldn't automatically class either of these as abuse by law enforcement without knowing more.
It's crazy to me that this got 61 upvotes while the main concern here, that 30,000 unrelated people had their data handed over to the government, is just an aside in point 1.
It really concerns me that people think any of this reasonable. If this is "reasonable" then there's nothing stopping cops from getting all of our data, whenever they want it. All they have to do is find one suspect who watched one video.
That's fucking crazy and clearly unreasonable. Take my downvote for having an exceptionally bad opinion on this topic.
Most people don't see the big picture. I remember people not supporting net neutrality.
Worry not, you are a voice of reason.
Neither of these is reasonable.
-
There certainly are situations where this could be reasonable; however, when your parameters return 30,000 people it's not nearly tailored enough.
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To get a warrant you need probable cause that a person committed a crime, I don't see how a live stream could meet that burden unless it starts prior to the arrival of the police.
These are both abuses by law enforcement, or more clearly, a path that allows their job to be easier by infringing on people's rights.
Seems to me the undercover agent made an extremely poor choice in links to send. If you expect to track down whoever clicked it, a link to a private video would be the obvious choice.
My theory for #1 is that it's an unlisted video targeted at extremists or maybe a "How to make an illegal item" guide
Which I also think can be reasonable
It shouldn't be illegal to learn how to make something illegal. I'm not allowed to build a nuke or a fully automatic assault rifle, but I should still be able to learn how they function.
Sounds like it wasn't really illegal (just a mapping / drone thing), as well as the behavior they were looking into wasn't something that was for-certain illegal (just trading cash for crypto, which is I guess "illegal adjacent" but not in itself illegal). IDK. The story as it was told was a little confusing / didn't completely make sense to me on the face of it as the complete story.
Why would you make up a reason to justify the government seizing people's data? Like damn I thought lemmy cared about privacy but this thread is wild with some of the comments I'm reading.
They were videos about using drones and AR to create maps. There's nothing illegal about that.
https://mashable.com/article/google-ordered-to-hand-over-viewer-data-privacy-concerns
Lovely. Wonder what the videos were?
Dream face reveal
ASMR videos of a parent proud of me
When companies tell you they respect your privacy and you should give them your data, you tell them it doesn't matter. Because policies can change, and at the end of the day, your privacy isn't always up to an single company.
Wait. This was last year, so not the capitol riot. What happened in January last year? I'm in a decent mood today. Just going to skip looking deeper into this one. I have Factorio to play!
Just another reason to not have a YouTube account. If you use Newpipe, you can subscribe to feeds anyway without any YouTube account.
Until youtube pulls a twitter move where eventually everything will only be available under a login. Wait and see.
Isnt NewPipe still making calls to YouTube from your IP? I think you'd need to also configure it to use an Invidious or Piped instance.
The headline made me think of back when phone networks were just starting to be fast enough to watch YouTube on data, a guy at the job I was working was caught watching videos of young girls in supposedly lacking state of dress splashing in inflatable pools or something along those lines. Dunno what happened to him but everyone thought he was a nice guy the day before and then suddenly everyone was grossed out by his mere existing.
My immediate concern though is do they account for people who were tricked into watching like with Rick rolling?
Are the problem with the people who watch the video, or the people who create, or host the videos?
Good thing I have history turned off so I can watch "How to make an AK47 from scratch" in peace :D
For anyone wondering what the videos were:
In a just-unsealed case from Kentucky reviewed by Forbes, undercover cops sought to identify the individual behind the online moniker “elonmuskwhm,” who they suspect of selling bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting.