Hacker News Reader

Comment by Qwertie | Hacker News Reader

The worst part is there isn't any possible way I know of to defend yourself against this other than not having a phone.

A while ago I thought of a very neat 'future job': you walk around town with somebody else's phone. So if you 'need to be' somewhere, you just hire this service, deliver your phone, which will be returned to you, and there goes your track record.

yeah but... then the customer doesn't have their phone

I need my phone, especially when I'm out

Use a drone to fly your primary phone to the location and relay the call to your secondary phone on your person.

That's fairly easily detectable through analysis, though.

Not if you use a clowder of feral cats.

It would probably be more detectable, since a cat's movement pattern would likely be very different from you or a stranger you hired.

I'm hoping the Librem 5 succeeds. I think disabling the baseband would be a solve and at least slightly more trustworthy than airplane mode.

Right now I think you're right, there's no defending against it without turning off devices.

> more trustworthy than airplane mode

All airplane mode does is turn of transmitters. There is no reason that the firmware should stop caching GPS data for later transmission

That probably won't do much for you in many urban areas in many countries. Municipalities are routinely maintaining data captured from license-plate scanners and some cities now have CCTV networks with facial recognition software. So unless you don't drive and walk around with a new rubber mask on every day you are still subject to the panopticon.

Most businesses these days have some kind of camera system for security, it won't be too long now before someone starts buying these video feeds from say Starbucks, etc. running recognition AI on them, tagging individuals, and selling this aggregated location data, maybe even realtime. At the moment, I don't think this would even violate any privacy laws.

>So unless you don't drive and walk around with a new rubber mask on every day you are still subject to the panopticon.

Gotta invent that Scramble Suit!

What about a decentralized networks over 802.11?

It wouldn’t be a total solution, because access points get hacked, etc. but it would make the data a lot fuzzier.

The reason that cell phone networks actually work (they're effectively decentralized networks) is that they pay the big bucks to rent space on high towers, building roofs, etc.

The only thing that matters for radio communications is line of sight. The only thing that gives you line of sight is relative height. The only thing that gives you consistent height is money.

Voice over WiFi definintely works. I don’t think “works” is the word you are looking for. “Won’t have great coverage” is maybe what you were going for.

A WiFi-based network with stronger privacy characteristics would be valuable to the small part of the market who cares more about privacy than coverage. Those people exist, ya?

By works I mean, doesn't cut out permanently and from then on at every small hill or rise in the ground. I've done a lot of real implemention of 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz mesh wireless networks.

I currently operate a 5 MHz channel at 910 MHz using broadband hamnet firmware on ubiquiti transceivers. This is for between home (custom antenna up on a tall 10m pole on my apartment) and my car (custom antenna popping up through the sunroof). By work, I mean, work at all for more than the first slight change in elevation. I've even tried using custom FPV narrowband solutions (56k SLIP) at 433 and 900 MHz and those do not better. The first slight rise in the ground kills you after a block or two. And I'm not in a super-hilly region.

I have no confidence than any ad-hoc deployed mesh network of 2.4 GHz is going to be good for anything but within a single home or building.

>The only thing that gives you consistent height is money.

Or long rope, a balloon, and a heat source ;)

> Or long rope, a balloon, and a heat source ;)

Good luck if a storm hits.

Fishing reel.

Until/unless they modify the law - turning off your phone thwarts it. While your phone is powered off, it has no ability to track & record your location movements. Obviously your active location will then be picked back up after you power it on, it won't have a record of anything inbetween.

A simple example of limiting the invasiveness using this approach, would be to have your phone on only at work & home, or similar. In absence of phone snooping, someone can already easily locate you at those two standard destinations, and can easily discover when you'd typically be at those places (ie you're not giving them much by using your phone there under normal circumstances).

So, use Google voice or setup your own w/ Twilio (try all numbers), and have a work cellphone and a home cellphone, a one-way pager (for when you are traveling), and another travel phone without a battery that you would use if necessary, based on the pager message?

Does turning the phone off actually turn the baseband off though?

How could we possibly tell?

While unreliable it wouldn't be unrealistic to use wifi in densely populated areas. It looks like the pager industry is still alive, too.

Most wifi hotspots have location information anyway, so your phone will know where it is, and then one of the many apps on your phone can report back with that information.

And isn't a pager just a really simple cell phone? I'm not sure how that's a solution if cell towers can triangulate your position.

I should have been clearer: One way pagers seem to still exist. They do not transmit.

Dan Geer (CISO at In-Q-Tel, has been warning about the dangers of surveillance for years) has spoken about how he uses a pager instead of a cell phone.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/08/11...

Isn't this just a billing distinction though? A 'receive only' pager still needs to announce itself to the cell tower to have messages routed...pretty sure they're not just multicast across the entire global cell network?

> cell network

Pagers do not use the cellular network. (some cellular networks do provide paging-style services, but that is a later development that is unrelated to traditional pagers)

> A 'receive only' pager still needs to announce itself

A traditional pager doesn't have a radio transmitter.

> they're not just multicast

The message is broadcast region-wide using very low-bandwidth protocols[1]. A pager will generally only work inside the region it is registered with. To compensate for the lack of ACKs, the message is usually repeated several times; it will missed if the pager is off for all of the transmissions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLEX_%28protocol%29

I wonder if even an old iPod Touch withought a cellular chip would actually be a useful decice for this kind of wi-fi-only connectivity.

You still can't be sure. Your car may contain a SIM card nowadays, always connected, for your protection, sure thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com