Trump Mobile exposed customers' personal data
techcrunch.com173 points by rippeltippel 3 hours ago
173 points by rippeltippel 3 hours ago
By the headline, I was half expecting "Trump Mobile was found selling customers' personal data"
this is especially problematic because now hackers have a comprehensive list of the most gullible people on the planet
Every problem, looked at from the right perspective, is actually a solution.
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Some people think they make smart comments but fail.
You could go read about it, i doubt you will
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Absolutely hilarious considering the absolute fuck all done by friends of epstein
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I forget that this site is run by friends of epstein so of course your comment stays and i get booted
Well, now your comment is awkward. They are flagged and yours is fine. You good?
Hey it's no biggie they are exempt from all rules, norms, and principals. Their customers love it even more when rules are broken so this is more like a bonus for them.
When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the PII.
> Their customers love it even more when rules are broken so this is more like a bonus for them.
You joke, but this is actually a pattern I see a lot. Is there a term for this sort of brain dead contrarianism? Ive noticed it for years, mostly among GenX where they will zealously defend any idea/action they heard thats against mainstream narrative.
It’s like a “stick it to the man teenager” stereotype but these people are fucking 50+ years old now.
It is primarily this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism
Mixed more generally with this:
I think this is an unfortunate consequence of the state of politics in the US (and in many other countries tbh).
Collectively we should really be getting angry with wealth inequality but those with wealth stir up any number of other issues (e.g. race, religion, gender, etc) in order to divert attention from them continuing to get richer at our collective expense.
Those "distractions" would be brought up regardless of any wealth inequality. They're entirely unrelated.
Depending on who you ask, those same topics are considered distractions from any other topic including each other.
What you're really describing is the attention bottleneck in a western democratic society where everybody wants the world to see things their way. That's the wrong mindset for democracy to work. If you want people to believe something it's simple: don't be wrong. Don't be vague and don't be misleading. Stop assuming the opposing side is stupid. Just speak clearly.
We really should blame ourselves for coming to every discussion with trivially incorrect arguments. People are so lazy these days. Slacktivism and terrorism used to be the extremes reserved for the ignorant. We used to shame and mock those people.
> Collectively we should really be getting angry with wealth inequality
But individually we're unable to abandon YouTube, iPhones and Windows 11. America's biggest B2C companies can do whatever they want and we'll all lap it up.
You’re not going to believe this but I’m a windows, YouTube and iPhone user, and am still pretty angry at the state of things.
You can be a customer of large companies and still be angry that large capital holders are tremendously advantaged in many ways.
Sure, but as a user don't expect to be able to change anything though, because companies know you won't switch away from their products.
Absolutely, I'm highlighting that you're a captive audience and every single FAANG exec knows it when they kiss the Trumpian ring.
Microsoft, Google and Apple all decided to side with the fed. Your outrage is inconsequential to them, and with the sum they spend on lobbying it's doubtful that your vote even matters to them either.
Bonhoeffer's Theory of Stupidity hits the nail on the head here.
He argued that in WW2, the people who were not able to question what they were doing were enabling a lot of the cruelty [0].
[0] https://bigthink.com/thinking/bonhoeffers-theory-stupidity-e...
I think that's always been a feature of contrarianism itself. It's so much more difficult to be contrarian and correct than simply contrarian that it applies most of the time, especially if someone uses that label explicitly.
"Contrarianism" can't be the only qualifying term unless you mean to lump in the majority of HN commenters.
Boomers get all the hate but GenX really is the absolute worst. They took the me-me-me of Boomers without the civic minded temperance of their G.I./Silent grandparents. Life goals of that generation include climbing mount everest, writing a novel, really anything that would make you sound "cool" at a cocktail party, but they never realized that nobody cares unless you've made the world a better place for others.
Gen X was the peak of lifetime lead poisoning contamination.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118631119
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/117h6n5/ge...
Life goals of that generation include climbing mount everest, writing a novel, really anything that would make you sound "cool" at a cocktail party, but they never realized that nobody cares unless you've made the world a better place for others.
Replace "cocktail party" with "social media" and you've described Millennials.
> Is there a term for this sort of brain dead contrarianism?
Reactionary[0]? Trump and the MAGA movement embody this desire to return to the "golden age" which is an idealized period in the 1950s where you had a factory job, a house, a family, and a simple life. Of course, "idealized" is the keyword there because it ignores the state of civil rights, medicine, workplace & car safety, etc. at that point in time.
Anyway, I think that's the term you're looking for. Contrarians are annoying, reactionaries are more akin to cult followers.
That's pretty good, but the Wiki page is far more diplomatic about definitions than my understanding of the word.
They have decades of Fox News brainwashing them into radicalization. The groups they hate are "plotting against them and looking down on them." The concept of returning to some idealized past is a superficial veneer over their actual desires: to harm the groups they disdain.
I would not have believed you if you had told me they had the engineering and operations talent to prevent personal data leaks, among many other things.
I would not have believed that they had 'engineering' or 'operations'.
"Hello, Aliexpress seller? Can you paint them gold?"
Is about how I expect it all went.
Has anyone yet seen one of those phones? Was it a honeypot all along? (A la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Trojan_Shield)
Edit0: they seem to exist and they have a headphone jack? Incredible.
In theory, maybe? This is behind a paywall...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/gadgets/trump-mobile-phone-revi...
Title: Trump Mobile T1 phone test: device no longer ‘Made in the USA.’
Heading: We tested the Trump Mobile phone. It was 9 months late and no longer ‘Made in the USA.’
And then there's https://www.cnet.com/pictures/the-t1-trump-phone-is-the-same... (linked in the sibling comment at The Verge)
"Trump Phones Are Finally Here—And People Aren’t Happy"
From the CNET article:
> There is a headphone jack, but it's on the top of the phone.
They say that like it is a bad thing. I've always preferred the headset jack on the top because if I'm using the device while sitting and the jack is on the bottom it interferes with resting my phone holding hand the table if I'm at my desk or on my chest or leg if I'm the couch.
The main argument I've heard for jack on the bottom is that most people normally put their phone in their pocket with the top down, so if the jack is on top you have to flip it.
Google is telling me that jack on top was the norm in the early days of smartphones but gradually changed as the pocket argument won out.
Of course this wouldn't matter at all if more phones rotated the screens so that the display was upright even if the phone is upside down. Then everyone could have the headphone jack where they want.
I think it's about when you put your phone in your pocket, you have to have it top-up while most people put it top-down, shortening the lenght of the cable and pushing against the connector. In that optic top jack is worse, I believe
I was going to say that I saw some unwrapping videos online, but then I saw... https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/936018/trump-mobile-t1-phon....
Personally, I still use my BidenPhone, which was an upgrade from my 2009-era ObamaPhone brick. /s
Was the /s needed?
You misunderestimate the gullibility of the average human. The \s is always needed (though the interrobang is also acceptable).
There have been quite a few punctuations proposed for indicating sarcasm, but interrobang not one of them - that (‽) is literally a combined ? and !, and is (per wikipedia) for "a question in an excited manner, expresses excitement, disbelief, or confusion in the form of a question, or asks a rhetorical question".
This page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation - has sarcasm ones (but I don't think any are as well known as the interrobang, which itself isn't exactly universally used... though personally I'm weird enough to have a keyboard shortcut to type it on my phone)
Given the facts of who it is that's impacted, isn't this the first good thing the administration has done?
Coffeezilla bought one of these thinking they’d never be delivered about a week before they announced they would be shipping soon. He wanted to do an exposé on the delays and thought Trump would never release the phone He will now end up with a crappy phone and his personal info exposed
They haven't shipped yet. Only 2 media/reviewer mockup phones have been seen in public.
"Walker said Trump Mobile is evaluating whether it needs to notify customers of the exposure of their personal data."
It was confirmed home/payment addresses were leaked, how is that not worthy of notification?
There are regulatory rules on when disclosure must occur. They're saying they're not going to bother if it's not required.
There was a time when telcos would print this information in a big book and deliver it to your porch for free.
Hell, in some states you can find these details rather quickly since there's so much that is considered public record.
relevant username.
Not quite true, though, because that book charged money in exchange for privacy.
It's worthy if they think they'd get good click through rate on "privacy protection service" scam links in the emails.
They must have hired the same developers as every other mobile operator.
My grandpa is almost 80 years old. He blatantly complains about stuff he doesn't understand but because he was once a big shot he think he does. He takes decisions almost as random as a 20 side dice but the numbers are just options and have no correlation among each other. Eventually he does something that seems to make sense, but if you live enough time with him you'll see that's by chance.
Right up there with the rest or telco.
I'm surprised that the idea for the Trump Phone was even conceived. I had thought that the drug king-pin Pablo Escobar pretty much owned the market for gold smartphones, and thus tainted it for anyone else.
> The company said there was no breach of Trump Mobile’s network, systems, or infrastructure.
Wait... what?
"I didn't lose your money because somebody broke into my house -- I only lost it because I left it sitting on the sidewalk. My house is actually fine, don't worry!"
Well trump mobile almost definitely doesn't have a network, systems, or infrastructure to begin with. So I guess they are technically correct.
The spokesperson said that the exposure was linked to a third-party platform provider that supports “certain Trump Mobile operations.” Walker did not name the provider.
Assuming somebody left a database open or password exposed.
My money is on unauthed mongodb or public s3 bucket
What are those? Our intern Bradley types victim, sorry Customer information in an excel spreadsheet all day and then emails it to his manager, who he's never met.
Oh, no! What an unexpected tragedy. In other news...
The picture in the article features Trump holding an iPhone.
He doesn't use any of this crap. He also wouldn't go within 100 feet of the vast majority of his supporters if he wasn't working an angle.
I can think of no product with the Trump name that hasn't proven to be a catastrophic disappointment or scam.
The only thing with trump I like is a hand of bridge.
we started using the term obama for that just because we hate saying that other word
The 1989 board game is supposedly an acceptable variation on Monopoly. I guess it's sales were a disappointment for the publisher, but not catastrophic.
The only surprise would be that it is not deliberate. Previously, the Trump White House deliberately exposed citizens' personal data. That's what customers should expect.