Wolfie Christl

Databroker Files: Targeting the EU Precise locations and revealing movement patterns: the mobile phone location data of millions of people in the EU is up for sale. Collected supposedly only for advertising purposes, this data can also...

Scoop: We obtained vast amounts of European mobile phone location data from data brokers. It was allegedly collected for advertising purposes only, but can be used to spy on high-ranking EU officials & NATO staff in Brussels. The Commission is 'concerned' & issued new security guidance to its staff.

Dug this stuff out of a dusty old box and am putting it in a new one, probably won’t see the light of day for another 20 years ,)

Back then, I was attending some kind of high school with a focus on electronic/information engineering, and either I was too slow or our teachers were too ambitious or both ;)

But we also got things completed, for example this Intel 8032/8051 board 🤖

Just stumbled across some things I built in school when I was 16 in the 1990s, all of them not exactly completed ehm.

- Heavy lab power supply (wounding the transformer included)
- Plotter (all the heavy metalwork!)
- 2m band receiver for packet radio (digital data transmission over amateur radio)

Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings : Foundation says it won't compromise policy of inclusivity even if that cash would've really helped

The PSF "walked away from a $1.5m government grant and you can blame the Trump administration's war on woke for effectively weakening some open source security"

As a longterm Python coder since 2001, I love this as much as I hate this ridiculous ’anti DEI’ bs.
www.theregister.com/2025/10/27/p...

Pay or ok? Why Europe's data watchdogs must reject "forced consent" Case law and enforcement decisions show that Europe's data watchdogs already have all the evidence they need to reject Pay or OK

Pay or ok? Why Europe’s data watchdogs must reject “forced consent”
www.iccl.ie/digital-data...

Depending on what I'm looking for I use all of them, including Bing, Yandex and aggregators.

My typical use case is finding results for specific terms or confirming that there're none. Even without "AI", this often doesn't work anymore. Search is broken, also in 'verbatim' mode and when adding +".

With “AI”, it often just fabricates fake evidence trying to confirm what my search suggests.

I have to use Google Search a lot for investigative research, unfortunately.

With those “AI” overviews, I feel like >50% of the claims are just made up, and >75% of the referenced/linked web pages are completely unrelated to the claims in the overview.

Systematic misinformation at scale.

DPAs must also "act against the other source of behavioural profiles: the tech platforms [who] have bundled behavioural profiling with service provision"

In any case, "studies to quantify the economic impact of removing tracking data on publisher income are based on flawed pricing assumptions".

The True Cost of RTB Our second "Pay or OK" paper for EU watchdogs: not only does the law say "no" to forced consent; the business case is terrible, too. Publishers and advertisers will lose if users are forced to consent...

"A market in which behavioural data about users are rare rather than the default will reset prices for all forms of advertising. To achieve this, users must be protected against coercion into RTB via ‘consent or pay’."

Make consumer surveillance rare again.
www.iccl.ie/digital-data...

Big Brother aus Österreich: Die Firma, die Handys weltweit überwachte Eine verdeckte Recherche legt offen, wie mit der Technik eines deutsch-österreichischen Unternehmens Politiker, Journalisten und Prominente getrackt wurden

And the surveillance vendor originates from ...Austria! Today it seems to be Austrian-German with affiliates in Indonesia and Dubai.

Much of the SS7 tracking went via Telecom Liechtenstein, back then owned by Telekom Austria (partly owned by the Austrian state):
www.derstandard.at/story/310000...

The surveillance system was used to track journalists, politicians, oligarchs, diplomats, prosecutors, managers, hollywood stars including in the US and Europe.

Clients included e.g. Belarus, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, UAE and Uzbekistan, according to the investigation.

Surveillance Secrets Trove of surveillance data challenges what we thought we knew about location tracking tools, who they target and how far they have spread

70+ journalists from 14 outlets examined a set of 1.5m internal location tracking records that show how the company's tech was used to surveil 14,000 phones/people in 160 countries, mainly 2007-2014. Plus, the journalists made it undercover to ISS World:
www.lighthousereports.com/investigatio...

The surveillance empire that tracked world leaders, a Vatican enemy, and maybe you Inside the hidden world of First Wap, whose untraceable tech has targeted politicians, journalists, celebrities, and activists around the globe.

"We uncovered a massive data trove. It revealed the hidden world of First Wap, whose untraceable tech has targeted politicians, journalists, celebrities, and activists around the globe"

Massive investigation into a SS7-based cellphone location tracking empire:
www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Big Brother aus Österreich: Die Firma, die Handys weltweit überwachte Eine verdeckte Recherche legt offen, wie mit der Technik eines deutsch-österreichischen Unternehmens Politiker, Journalisten und Prominente getrackt wurden

Große internationale Recherche incoming: "Big Brother aus Österreich: Die Firma, die Handys weltweit überwachte". Eine ziemlich wilde Geschichte mit vielen spannenden Details, hier lang >>>
www.derstandard.at/story/310000... #SurveillanceSecrets

New Microsoft Tool Lets Your Boss Track If Your Team Uses AI "Sufficiently" - WinBuzzer Microsoft's new Copilot benchmarks in Viva Insights let managers track AI adoption, raising privacy concerns reminiscent of its 2020 'Productivity Score' tool.

"Microsoft is introducing new Copilot adoption benchmarks to its Viva Insights platform, a move that lets managers monitor and compare how teams are using the company’s flagship AI assistant"

ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day Documents show that ICE has gone back on its decision to not use location data remotely harvested from peoples' phones. The database is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data.

New from 404 Media: ICE to buy tool that tracks locations of hundreds of millions of phones every day. Billions of pieces of location data. ICE previously stopped using data remotely harvested from smartphones. Now it's buying it again. Usually used w/o warrant
www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

Security concern as tens of thousands of phone locations for sale Data showing the specific movement of tens of thousands of smartphones in Ireland is available to purchase within the digital marketing and advertising industries, an undercover Prime Time investigati...

"Phones in the data could be tracked back to specific residential addresses after entering ... military bases, and Leinster House, as well as sensitive locations like health clinics"

Another media investigation into commercial mobile/app location data in Ireland:
www.rte.ie/news/primeti...

Former Meta lobbyist named DPC Commissioner: Meta now officially regulates itself According to reports in the Irish news, Niamh Sweeney, a former senior Meta lobbyist, is set to join the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) as a commissioner in October

I was really hoping things might get better with GDPR enforcement at its Irish lead regulator, but this is Ireland giving the middle finger to EU data protection and to a democratically governed digital society.
noyb.eu/en/former-me...

If true, this update is astonishing.
The Commission climbed down from a planned break up of Google’s ad business to a mere fine, and then dropped even the fine for fear of offending Trump.

This is for market violations that have been proven in U.S. court.

Algorithmisches Management via Smartphone Digitale Steuerung und Kontrolle von Beschäftigten im Außendienst – von technischer Wartung bis mobile Pflege

"Algorithmisches Management via Smartphone. Digitale Steuerung und Kontrolle von Beschäftigten im Außendienst – von technischer Wartung bis mobile Pflege"

Die Studie gibts hier: crackedlabs.org/mobilearbeit

Überwacht vom digitalen Chef | MO | 01 09 2025 | 17:55 Wie Firmen ihre Außendienstmitarbeiter via App kontrollieren

Kleiner Ö1-Beitrag über meine aktuelle Studie im Auftrag der @arbeiterkammer.at, es geht um Beschäftigtenüberwachung im Außendienst, Apps als digitale Peitsche und Stress im der Heimkrankenpflege. Irgendwann dann wieder mit weniger Wiener Dialekt ;)
oe1.orf.at/programm/202...

h/t @malteengeler.bsky.social via @dgolumbia.bsky.social

Langdon Winner (1997) on "cyberlibertarianism, a collection of ideas that links ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics": dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Don't use Copilot für anything with numbers in Excel ,)

More than 40% of 543 data brokers registered under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) failed to respond to data access requests, "in an apparent violation of the CCPA".

"Consumer Beware!", the "first large-scale, systematic study of CCPA compliance": arxiv.org/pdf/2506.21914

I only know media reports (till now)

So, a German court said the German federal DPA cannot ban German government agencies from running FB pages (aka jointly processing data unlawfully for Meta's benefit), because whatever, and because only DPC Ireland, which hasn’t done anything relevant in years, could.

I was always against singling out public institutions, and I was always in favor of targeting Meta itself rather than joint controllers caught in broken digital infrastructure, but this is just another GDPR enforcement fail/farce.