I think this comment is based on an extremely optimistic – bordering on fantastical – outlook.

The complexity of dealing with such large amounts of information will keep increasing forever as the amount of information also grows

The capacity and capability to handle the data will grow too.

AI struggles with conflicting information and mistakes, which happen a lot especially when humans are involved, so eventually you will have lots of “garbage in garbage out” issues causing problems

This is what data analysis is though. Extracting patterns from noisy data. Ignoring outliers. I don’t think anybody is suggesting they’ll just dump a CSV of your web history into ChatGPT and ask it if you’re probably going to a protest this weekend (although does it sound so far fetched that that might actually work?), it’ll be used in combination with existing and constantly improving data mining techniques.

The data one might be able to track will continuously be challenged or removed on legal/compliance bases over time, reducing its availability

Are you implying data protection laws will not only not be inexorably eroded year upon year by increasingly surveillance-hungry governments, but will actually get a significantly better than their current milquetoast state? I’ve gotta say, that’s seeming increasingly unlikely to me; right now we’re seeing mandatory identity verification being legislated on more and more things by more and more governments.

Yes the NSA might want our chatbot logs, but after enough people realize they might be/are getting them, people will stop feeding it as much, or introduce noise on purpose

This has to be a sarcastic reference to Snowden, right? The thing where the entire world found out about the how NSA absolutely is – not “might be” – monitoring your internet and conversation logs, and basically nobody did a fucking thing to change? That was 12 years ago.

And the sheer volume of information relative to the computing power necessary to process everything will also become a problem if they keep trying to process every single thing.

Good thing they’re not doing anything crazy to get more computing power, like buying up practically the entire global supply of RAM or building data centres at an exponentially increasing rate.

My first answer is “WTF is RTK?”; my answer after consulting Wikipedia is “no, they’re separate things”.

RTK doesn’t sound like it broadcasts any data out but I barely understood what I just read. The Wikipedia coverage on this whole topic seems rather poor quality, I don’t think it’s just because I’m dumb.

It’s not as clear-cut as most people here are saying.

In short, GPS itself is just listening to satellites, and nothing is leaked that way, but most modern phones use “Assisted GPS” of some sort. The most common (I believe) AGPS is SUPL, which seems to be used by most phones. This involves sending your approximate location to an Internet server, which returns satellite data based on that approximate location.

To nobody’s surprise, in Android this is a Google server. I’m pretty sure most Android distros don’t give you any control over when it’s used, or which servers it uses. Anecdotally, my phone without Google Play services has a horrible time obtaining a GPS fix, so I suspect without GPlay it’s only using raw GPS, but I’ve not bothered to actually dig into it.

As I understand it, SUPL means even if you’re in aeroplane mode, if you have an Internet connection over WiFi you might still be leaking (approximate) location data when using GPS.

I learned about this from this excellent series of blog posts, which is a very thorough comparison of various Android ROMs’ privacy. It has a background section (search for “Assisted GPS”) in each of the ROM-specific posts which explains it better than I can.

It’s a screenshot of this report from a review of the UK’s security and terrorism legislation, published in December.

TechRadar article discussing the specific encryption issue here.

I was skeptical given the grammar issues others have pointed out but it seems legitimate.