Beer rating app reveals homes and identities of spies and military bods, warns Bellingcat A beer and pub-rating app built off the back of Foursquare’s location-tracking API poses a risk to the security of military and intelligence personnel, according to legendary OSINT website Bellingcat. Untappd 'has over eight million mostly European and North American users, and its features allow researchers to uncover …
...is that it reveals beer drinkers. Because I am a man of wealth and taste I now sup on a mixture of hand sanitiser, antifreeze and a dash of battery acid for “bite”. I have long since left beer behind, as have all gentlemen isolators.
(Does anyone know of a good cure for severe mouth ulcers? Would beer work?)
You must have kept that Blue Nun an awfully long time. It's probably corked.
The cure for drinking inferior German Riesling is not to drink inferior German Riesling.
Sick to the Trockenbeerenauslese. (This commercial comes to you from the German Viticulture Bruderschaft.)
As a gentleman isolator I've returned to my old hobby of homebrewing. Seem to be getting it right and the supply normally lasts a few days whereas sending the misses out for battery acid and hand sanitizer normally comes up with just battery acid and my cooking covers that area of taste.
I'd say about social media:
1: Never post photos of self, family or friends. Use email or a private channel to share to family.
2: Never use your real name.
3: Never talk about where you live any more detailed than a county or city.
Unless you are famous and attention seeking, or selling on SM.
Best to avoid it altogether. There was a similar issue with an app that used fitbit or some other fitness tracker.
Why is Google allowed to buy fitbit?
Having an obscure name also helps as it turns out. You have to go 6 pages deep in Google before I turn up, linked to my github ironically (which is mostly empty).
Everything else is mostly looked down, save for the odd YouTube comment (though I have been quoted on one now over tea which amuses me no end) but it's always kept nice and short save for mild interaction and never for spite.
It always surprises me that so many people don't mind not using a pseudonym (though I know a few who intentional change name spellings for professional reasons which works for them).
Anon.
There's ~2,500 people in the world with my surname - for my first name, as far as I can find there's about 12 give or take. Of those, there's only 4 in the UK. The rest are in Canada (If I included my middle name, then it's just me, my daughters even more so).
Also means that even though I work for a company with 100K+ people on the books with company email addresses, I'm the only one with my surname in the whole company. I'm just aware that we leave trails behind and have taken steps over the years to keep my head down.
There are 5 living people just in my extended family with the same first name and surname, but with different middle names. I share the same nickname (based off middle name) and last name (but no relation) with a road building company manager targeted by ecoterrorists.
It was always fun, as a kid, to have a telemarketer call our house and ask for <firstname lastname>. It was clear they wanted my dad, but he would hand the phone to one of us kids (like a 5-year-old) with the same name...
My family name is a common word, as a result when Facebook first appeared and I tried to sign up multiple times I was rejected each time and then received a message from them saying that I would be prosecuted if I didn't stop attempting to log in with a fake name (my real name).
As a result I completely abandoned any attempt to create a social media profile anywhere - I'm so happy these days that I don't exist in the social media world!
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A mate of mine has a slightly obscure name and there's somebody with exactly the same name in Canada. He doesn't come up in Google searches (which he much prefers) just this other bloke. He applied for a job and at the interview they said they didn't understand why he didn't look like the person they'd Googled. He said he had't got any internet presence and they were looking at some Canadian bloke instead.
It is truly astounding to realize that people who should be intelligent enough to know better still sell their lives to any app that tickles their funny bone.
I really would like to read a psychiatrist's study on this apparently innate need to sell one's personal life in order to give one's opinion on something.
"YOU CAN'T ARREST ME!! I'M A SPY!!"
https://snoop.app/
All that lovely data about you and your family in one place just right to be hacked. Save you money? Maybe but I don't want the hackers to get my data.
Don't even get me started on the [redacted] stupid choice of name. This is a clear magnet for the identity thieves.
I (dimly) recall when a certain U.S. State mandated that nobody be allowed to block caller-id, with the exception of undercover police officers. I hope that idea went away, along with the idea of slapping a Police Lot parking sticker on Crockett's Ferrari Daytona replica.
The fact that you do not allow an application to access location information may give you a false sense of security. Any photo you take with your phone usually contains location in its exif data (the camera probably has access to location info even if the app you are using it from does not). So if you upload a photo (as the beer application wants you to do), your location as well as date & time can be easily retrieved from the photo.
Obviously you *could* delete exif data or change it on an image of a tropical beach to set the location in the artic circle, but few people do so.
Photography at [redacted] not particularly welcome :-) But of course, I realised that the recepits that I email, unencrypted, to the company's expense portal probaly contained the geotag (and even if they didn't, they've usually got the addresses of the hotels, bars and restaurants on!)
And "or log in with Facebook" in their application or on their web site is ANOTHER red flag... [it's one of the big ways that FB uses to track you]. Of course, if you DO have the FB 'previously logged on' cookies and ALSO see the FB icon or the "or log in with Facebook" option, chances are they ALREADY tracked you there and just want you to confirm you actually WANTED them to.
If you are in a sensitive job don't use social media.
Even posting photos, without lat / long metadata is not safe, as possible to still find the location by comparing against other images and chance of some of those having location data (or even getting real people to ID the location for you using localish knowledge)
On a more prosaic note, never mind foreign spy agencies finding military personnel, anyone at risk from burglars figuring out local targets & jumping for joy when a social media post reveals they are on holiday away from their home address
The closest pub according to Google maps is a mile away, the closest pub that sells beer worth drinking over two miles away.
That's why this app is so dangerous. For 70 years, it's cover had remained intact as a sensitive government research facility, complete with high security to keep the rabble out. Reality is the 'A' has always stood for 'Alcohol', at least since it's establishment 1/4/1950.. Which also shows the bit of HMG responsible for it had a sense of humor, along with a very large drinks budget.
Frankly I'm surprised that the entire armed forces simply don't make it a disciplinary offence for serving members in sensitive positions to use social media - or at the very least somehow censor contributions before publication.
Such an offence should also apply to relevant civilian employees.
Failure to comply would be subject to severe penalties.
Disclaimer: I have never served, so happily stand to be corrected.
in all the 'work' done, pubs chosen were close to publicly known establishments.....so why even bother with the tech? you could just visit those places
directly. you've just got an armchair version of the same sort of thing by using an App. another rule: don't 'Tap in' when actually drinking - unless you really want to be a target. delay the recording until you are somewhere else.
I would guess that most spies already know which pubs to hang around. I'd also guess even relatively inept "Four Lions" style wannabee terrorists could work out the same. it doesn't take long in London to work out which pubs are which or to overhear drunk people getting a bit loud about what they do.
Sounds like the sort of app that pub landlords can use to totally denigrate fellow landlords establishments and sados who've been chucked out to do the same. Have you never read an Amazon review. I would give it the same respect a government speech - zilch. Sod proxy drinking - I didnt spend 50 hours tearing up my car with my fingernails while my daughter( who has no interest in drinking learnt to drive) not to actually visit places if they let me out, My favourite establishment serves beer that tastes like piss occasionally but when its good (and it can be very very good) I'm not likely to let others know about it.
We were approached on the street in Barcelona, must be 15 years ago now, by what turned out to be a perfectly legit company that organise your drinking for you. Bascially any large party of tourists will be assigned a person in a yellow t-shirt, whose job is to take you to the best bars (well the ones that hand the company the best kickbacks anyway) - and to talk to you in whatever language you can cope with and organise ordering your drinks for you.
As I said at the time, the day I can't organise my own trip to the pub* is the day I'll ask someone to put me out of my misery. It's not like it's hard. I mean even if you can't manage a couple of very basic local words (please, thankyou, bill and names of drinks / food items) - there's always pointing. A smile and an effort, plus a willingness to look a bit silly will get you what you want. After all, they know you've gone there to drink, and they have the stuff they sell on display. So pointing and waving money will usually get you what you want.
The skill is knowing what places not to go into, and there are usually pretty clear visual clues. But that is a reason to check reviews of places, if you're not local and have nobody to recommend decent places to you.
*"Organised fun" is a horrible contradiction in terms. Hiring a party organiser is perfectly acceptable if you're doing PR for a sales event or I suppose if you're rich and have a huge family wedding or something. But needing a party organiser to go to the pub is a terrible indictment of your social skills.
Barcelona also has a cathedral of beer or something. I've been there but I cant seem to recall the name for some reason. But beer is different there than here in the UK. Craft beer places seem to have mediocre tapas - possibly because its easier to sommelier for a more limited and expected taste range.
Mind you I had a 'sour' in the Nags Head in Reading not long ago and I doubt there's is a food in the world that would complement that.
Can we please not discourage them?
Spies are a menace to society. Let's publish all their names and addresses. And not just ours, let's use these tools to track down and publicize the names and addresses of the Russians and Israelis too.
While we're at it, let's go even harder after the secret police. Every cop's name, address, picture, and license plates should be plastered all over the web.
Years ago , got a hotel bill for many thousands for a seven day stay in a Middle East place. With a number of uncommon forenames but a common surname, it turned out I had an identically named UK 'Official' in same hotel organising a trade conference. Umm, found we were distantly related, but four identical forenames is unusual as two of them are not English names.
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