Stop enabling the surveilance state

#blog

When you share photos to social media, this can be used in a myriad of ways to track and endanger yourself - but more likely - other people. It's an example of how Use of everyday social media helps create weaponised tech without our awareness.

The recent rise of authoritarianism has led to greater use of existing technology to track people. For example, filming anything on a smartphone creates three risks of making someone trackable:

1. Identification risk through facial recognition technology. The faces, tattoos, voices, license plates and clothes can be used to identify people. This can disproportionately affect some people; facial recognition is less accurate for darker skin tones, and Techwashing enables law enforcement to harass people who have been wrongly identified by the software.
2. Location sharing. Photos and videos taken by (practically) all phones contain locations and timestamps. These are not removed by default when you share to social media. What's worse, on iPhones^[1], the privacy settings for sharing photos to social media are aggressively limited by Instagram, Whatsapp etc. While privacy-respecting apps such as DuckDuckGo permit you to automatically remove location-data from photos you share^[2], social media is all-or-nothing if you upload photos from within the apps (the most convenient way, probably used by most people). There is a way to bypass this, but it's clunky (perhaps by design)^[3].
3. Phone seizure. If your phone is confiscated (ie from being arrested at a protest), your messages, contacts, cloud accounts and perhaps all data can be used as evidence to (lawfully, but perhaps wrongfully) incriminate yourself and others. It's very easy for law enforcement to access this if you use fingerprint or face locks (aka "biometric security"), and much harder if you have a long passcode. Before you go to protests, consider turning off your biometric locks - or even better, leave your primary phone at home and take an old digital camera.