“I thought it would be really funny if a stranger came over asking to do a poo,” explained Will. They never did, and about a year ago Will moved out.
Recently, Will had a look to see if Big Dumpers was still marked on Google Maps. It was. He was getting monthly emails about the performance of his business with information on how many people had viewed it or clicked to see its phone number.
But looking at the app’s listing for the “business”, Will spotted something that he didn’t find as funny. Like many other businesses, Google Maps showed a “Popular times” graph depicting how popular the location is using information provided by Google users who’ve agreed to let the app access their geolocation data. 9AM on Thursday was a busy time for Big Dumpers, according to Google Maps, but completely empty later in the day.
What clicked in Will’s mind is that he had inadvertently created a public tracker of when people were in his share house — almost certainly without their knowledge. Will quickly voluntarily “closed” his business on Google but the listing remained up afterwards.
After being informed of the exploit by Crikey, founder of Australian information security company DVULN Jamieson O’Reilly said that his review of Google’s technical material corroborated Will’s understanding of the situation.
“My gut tells me you could list any place as a business then if the residents had opted in to location services you could totally use it to measure someone’s patterns,” he said.
By Cam Wilson
Amid the flurry of misinformation and misleading online content about the Israel-Hamas war that’s circulating on social media, these images, too, are being used without disclosure of whether they are real or not.
A handful of small online news outlets, blogs and newsletters have featured “Conflict between Israel and Palestine generative AI” without marking it as the product of generative AI. It’s not clear whether these publications are aware it is a fake image.
Last month the government’s tender website, AusTender, published a contract between the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and ShadowDragon Holdings, LLC. The contract runs for two years and is valued at $563,040.
ShadowDragon Holdings is an American company that sells software collecting “open source intelligence software, unique datasets and training” to organisations, including the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as well as state police forces in New York and Michigan.
ShadowDragon’s products pull data from a range of public online platforms — reportedly more than “200 unique sources and datasets” — to make them searchable for its users.
The full list of places isn’t published but its promotional material lists places including Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, X, Google, Amazon, Tumblr, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Reddit, 4Chan, Skype, Spotify, Twitch, Xbox network, PornHub, SoundCloud, Gab, Foursquare, Tripadvisor, Tinder, Etsy, PayPal, Flickr, Imgur, Disqus, eBay, GitHub, DeviantArt, Blogger, FetLife, BitChute, parenting forum BabyCenter, social network for Black people BlackPlanet and more.