Man Creates "Creepy" Stalking App 142
An anonymous reader writes "Creepy, a package described as a 'geolocation information aggregator,' is turning heads in privacy circles, but should people be worried? Yiannis Kakavas explains why he developed his scary stalking application. Creepy is a software package for Linux or Windows — with a Mac OS X port in the works — that aims to gather public information on a targeted individual via social networking services in order to pinpoint their location. It's remarkably efficient at its job, even in its current early form, and certainly lives up to its name when you see it in use for the first time."
paranoia ho! (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone instantly worried that installing this software in your own machine might also make any data on that machine available for stalking?
It somehow doesnt seem like a good idea to me to trust a programmer proficient at this kind of this without a very very thorough code review first
Is this the new wild west? (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Anonymous, Wikileaks and other activists
3. Firesheep, Creepy and other social media privacy exploits
4. Botnets and other advanced commercial malware
5. Stuxnet and other government actors
.
In the 90's and early 00's it was the Frontier, where everyone gave everyone else a hand. Now, we need to start walking around with six shooters.
The amount of data breaches alone are frightening: http://www.privacyrights.org/data-breach#CP [privacyrights.org] , http://www.databreaches.net/ [databreaches.net]
Ummmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know that this really does much you can't do fairly easily already. So if you have someone's name and city, there is a good chance you can locate them. Why? All kinds of things in the public record you could look up. Own a house? Then there's a record of that publicly available. Phone numbers are normally listed (though with the increase in cell phones that is less common).
What it comes down to is that in a modern society, we are going back to how it was in older, smaller societies: You can have privacy, but you cannot have anonymity, at least not without a good deal of trouble and sacrifice.
So back in the day, with much smaller communities and so on you had an "everyone knows everyone" situation. Not literally, but people were known to a substantial part of the town. As such it was just not possible to be anonymous. Your comings and goings were noticed. Where you lived was known, that kind of thing. If you moved to a new place, again you've be noticed. Short of going and living a very solitary life, you couldn't be anonymous.
Now privacy you could have, easily. If you wanted a private conversation, just walk out in a field where nobody was within earshot. In your house you had almost complete certainty nobody could spy since there was no advanced technology. What you did you could keep private to a large degree. That you were around doing things you could not.
As things grew anonymity became more and more possible. You could just disappear in a large city, go about your business but be unknown and invisible to most everyone.
Well, that is changing back again. Technology is making it such that anonymity is going away. It is just very difficult to make yourself unknowable. Privacy is certainly possible, and the Supreme Court has ruled it is a right and thus the government is required to respect it. However anonymity is pretty hard.
So that an app can find where you live fairly easily isn't surprising at all to me. There's just a lot of public documents on you, and the Internet makes it easy to search them. The information you choose to provide on social network sites makes it even easier.
It is just kinda something we have to accept, unless we want to radically alter how society works.
Also we need to understand that anonymity and privacy are not the same thing. Too many people conflate the two. They think a right to privacy means the right to be totally unknown. Not the case. It means the right to have the specifics of your life secret, not that you are living your life a secret.
What you do in your house is your private business. That you are in your house it not private. You neighbours can watch you come home and leave, and know when you are there. That is 100% legal and ethical. You will not be anonymous. However they can't go and spy on you and see what you are doing. You can still be private.
Re:Twitter and Flickr (Score:4, Insightful)
It's also supposed to make people more aware of the kind of information they're giving away. Most people just don't think about that sort of thing. Sharing with friends is fun. They have no idea that they're sharing the exact same data (and even more; who even knows about exif data?) with the entire world. And the world does include some very creepy people.
Re:Ummmm (Score:4, Insightful)
While it's hard to put this into a formal definition, there's a different between random observation in public and systemic surveillance. If you had a person that stayed two steps behind you everywhere you went and noticed everything you put in your grocery basket, took notes at the pub how many beers you were drinking, followed you home and knew where you slept and if you brought anyone with you home, most people would be seriously creeped out even though technically it all happens "in public". I'm not so worried about someone actually doing that, maybe you could if you put a whole team of undercover detectives on me but it's not practical to do on any scale.
With technology though the rules change. It becomes very possible to track everyone, all the time with relatively little manpower. Like the EU data retention directive that requires the location of all cell phone traffic be stored for 6-24 months. For a smart phone that checks for mail etc. in the background that's practically 24x7 surveillance, like we've all been radio tagged. For public transport they're pushing for electronic tickets, for private transport there's electronic toll road readers - it's not impossible to travel anonymously, just very impractical. Unless you want to fly, in which case it is impossible.
Same goes with money, they're fighting harder and harder for everyone to use electronic money. If I pay anyone over 1800$ in cash here in Norway, I can be held as an accessory to their tax fraud. What happens is that they don't wrap in surveillance, it's not some extra papers you fill in to have it logged. It's wrapped in convenience - online banks are so much simpler than the way we did before, oh and we keep a copy of all the records too. Same with cell phones, great invention. Oh and it also doubles as your tracking device. If I locked it around your ancle you'd protest, but if I can make 95%+ use it voluntarily 95%+ of the time, we can go after those "must have something to hide" people.
Re:Sue-age (Score:5, Insightful)
We're punishing the tool maker for its misuse again? Someone should warn Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.
Re:Not creepy at all (Score:4, Insightful)
I like the idea that it's okay for government and corporations to data mine you and stalk you, but the individual data mining against the individual is "creepy" and evil and blah blah blah.
Re:Twitter and Flickr (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, they don't care now. The point of Creepy is to maybe put a dent in the apathy. If a proper news source were to pick this up under the banner of "A stalker could be after your kids using this app!", people might start to care.
Oh please no. Because once that happens, the politicians will get involved. And nothing good can ever come of that.