NSA finally admits to spying on Americans by purchasing sensitive data

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 401 points – NSA finally admits to spying on Americans by purchasing sensitive data
arstechnica.com

NSA finally admits to spying on Americans by purchasing sensitive data::Violating Americans’ privacy "not just unethical but illegal," senator says.

27

You are viewing a single comment
View all commentsShow the parent comment

I don't think AI is necessary. Reddit was able to find all my alt accounts pretty easily years back. Now I'm banned I can't even sign up without the new account being banned in a few days for trying to circumvent it.

Eh, it was detecting my alts when I wouldn't clean cookies before registering a new one. When I would, it wouldn't.

Cleaning caches and cookies for the website you are creating an alt on is basic procedure.

Edit: Likely Sounds to me like an IP and/or MAC address ban (MAC address is tied to motherboards IIRC). I got banned once from one of my old favorite games (PSO2) for mistakenly swapping my vpn mid game. After a lot of troubleshooting and an apartment move in between, a MAC spoofing program is what did the trick.

Side note, does lemmy use markdown format? If not, does anyone know what it uses?

Reddit can't see your MAC address. You don't have a direct L2 connection to Reddit.

While the game can, since it's running on your machine and can see everything.

EDIT: And I doubt they do IP bans of subnets given to end users, that's stupid, people change IPs all the time.

Yeah, that was poor wording on my part, reading my comment back. I said it's likely that it was either of those, but I was thinking more along the lines of "it sounds similar to either of those". I also doubt they do IP bans, and I don't know enough about MAC address logistics. I assumed they'd be able to pull that info from a web browser, depending on the one used.

MAC address is tied to motherboards IIRC

It isn't. It's tied to your network hardware, and can be randomised/changed at will (or at least, the one it sends out can be altered). Some phones do that when connecting, to make it harder to track them, for example.

If you're using an ethernet port on your motherboard, then it'd be tied to that, but if you're using Wi-Fi/Ethernet from a Network card, it'll be connected to the card.

Ah, that makes more sense. I couldn't remember the specifics but I've have always done ethernet on my pc so that checks out for my experience.

I think it's a combination of IP address as well as app fingerprint when you login to multiple accounts within their app - they can see each account coming from the exact same app/device. I personally believe this was a HUGE part of killing off third party apps so they could collect a lot more data directly about you in their own app.

And IP factors in too. I was in hospital WiFi for a few days when my kid was born and got a random message on all of my accounts that I was banned for 7 days for "ban evasion". Never been banned before and had only posted on some parent subs during that time.

I think the IP address probably had bans associated with it given it was such a huge public network and was next door to a high school that used the hospital food court a lot too, and thus the WiFi also.

Depends, depends. In your case it's probably about cookies, or IP. Maybe it's inferred identity, hence why it takes a few days.

Are cookies or IP enough for 90% of people? Yeah. But I'm sure that data is worth less, because they already have tons of data on those folks.

What about the 10% that might be using a VPN? The <1% using tor?

That data could be more valuable because it's harder to get.