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Comment by politician | Hacker News Reader

Do you carry your smartphone with you in your car?

While I disagree with GP, I also think a smartphone whose location services can be turned off is different than an "always on" car GPS

You can turn off location services, however that still does not prevent your location from being tracked by your carrier. They know where you are, which tower you are connected to, etc. The only way to avoid tracking is to not carry a cell phone, simply turning off location services doesn't keep you from being tracked.

Yes, but your carrier is in many places subject to a whole bunch of privacy legislation. The chances of your CDRs or triangulation info walking out the door there are fairly low. Compared to commercial organizations that sell your data at the drop of a hat I'd trust a cell phone provider long before I'd trust a company in some other country not beholden to local laws.

> sell your data at the drop of a hat

Tesla's privacy policy does say that this data won't be shared outside of "Tesla personnel" [0] - what evidence do you have that Tesla would break their agreement with their customers, and which law(s) in which country(s) prohibit carriers from selling location data?

[0] https://www.tesla.com/about/legal

The word 'Tesla' was not in my comment, as for the second point all of Europe, and probably many other countries besides. The data can be sold but only when it is not associated with PII.

As I understand it, a smartphone is also able to be tracked when the device is powered off. The only solution is to remove the battery (difficult if it's soldered), or to leave it at home.

Most people don't carry portable Faraday cages.

That's only true if the baseband is still alive and pinging the tower. That's easy enough to find out (field strength meter, $5 in parts next to the phone).

A smartphone (actually any cellphone) can be detected when it's powered off (assume flat battery), but not tracked. Works using ferromagnetism, which also detects explosives.

The part about the battery is very interesting! I googled it and couldn't find any more information though... do you have any links?

Here's a link. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130723/12395923907/even-...

Wow! I never heard of that. It looks like that article is about govt applying spyware to phones, like how they also made companies give them user data. By the same token, I guess the govt could work with car manufacturers to install tracking devices in every car...

Tesla is helping a bit here, free of charge.

Furthermore, they are required by federal law to do so for entirely benevolent purposes. See the E911 Mandate from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanc...

Why wouldn't airplane mode solve this problem?

One could argue that cellphones might secretly call home even on airplane mode and we shouldn't trust them, but then again, why couldn't one apply the same conspiracy theory against vehicles not made by Tesla?

I can easily wrap my cell phone in a Faraday cage that I'm pretty sure can't be penetrated by a malicious (or just nosey) baseband processor on the phone.

It's harder to drive a car when it's wrapped in tinfoil.

Is having a smartphone mandatory now?

Well put; I suppose I should have referred to "a" smartphone rather than implied ownership of a smartphone. On the other hand, the smartphone installed base is on the order of 3.4B devices, so I'd ask that you give me the benefit of the doubt for assuming that an HN reader owns a smartphone.

I don't, and for precisely those reasons. Actually I do own them for testing and dev purposes but never ever carry them with me, my regular phone is an oldie from just before the smartphone hit. I fear the day that it will die.

Honestly, I'm jealous. While I find them convenient, I also find them troubling.

politician didn't say having a smartphone was mandatory, nor did marssaxman say having a tesla was mandatory. politician is merely guessing that marssaxman might have a cellphone tracking their location, so having tesla track their location wouldn't be much worse

He wrote 'smartphone', not 'cellphone' and presumably knows the difference.

With a cellphone the GPS in the phone can - and will - track you six ways from Sunday unless you are very very careful, with a cellphone the carrier does not so much 'track your location' as that they record field strength to determine which tower you connect to as well as to manage the handover. To turn that into location data is absolutely possible but not nearly as accurate as GPS, especially not when you stop moving for a while.

I apologize for writing "cellphone" instead of specifically "smartphone" in my comment - I meant to say the latter.

Nevertheless, what you describe sounds a lot like a "smartphone with location services off" (assuming you trust the smartphone)

Accelerometer can do some pretty impressive dead reckoning once you have a fix. Microphones can be used for triangulation based on multiple fixes on the same sound sources (used for shot detection, but it works the other way around too).

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-04/smartphone-...

Smartphones can track you in a large number of ways, and you really should not trust them (esp. not if they are Android).

great question... patiently waiting for the answer

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