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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine!

I am, and it scares the hell out of me. If I have to choose between having emergency responders possibly not being able to locate me, and having the government be able to track my every move along with everyone else's, it's not even a hard choice: I'll take the former as by far the lesser of the two evils.

Being able to reliably hide my location is every bit as important to personal freedom as being able to encrypt my communications. If that means I have to take some additional steps to summon help in an emergency, so be it. It's a price I'll happily pay. Life's quality metric is a vector, and safety is not the only dimension.

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This is not about opening a backdoor that would allow 911/etc. to request your phone’s location.

It’s only about sending your location when you specifically ask for help in an emergency situation.

—

That being said, mobile phones are inherently trackable by mobile carriers using triangulation. I know it’s obvious, but it’s worth considering that staying untrackable with a mobile is, as far as I understand, fundamentally impossible.

> It’s only about sending your location when you specifically ask for help in an emergency situation.

No, it's not. Go back and re-read the comment I was responding to. Pay particular attention to the following passages:

> Consider how much real-time location info — and live HD video streams — can 1 mobile phone produce, and how close to none of that is available in an emergency situation.

> Consider how 911 is but one service, and that this is a worldwide problem. And that smartphones are worldwide too, and that there’s hundreds of millions of them.

The GP is specifically talking about expanding the capability beyond just location and beyond just 911, and talking about this as if it were a foregone conclusion that this will be an unalloyed good. That is what scares me.

The GP is me. :)

I apologize if my original comment was not clear, or could leave itself open to a different interpretation.

I really did mean that when someone in an emergency situation needs help, presently, they do not have the ability to send their location, a text message, an image or a video.

That’s it — I was only referring to emergency situations, and anything that I am discussing would be user-initiated.

> The GP is me. :)

Oh, sorry, I didn't see that. (This thread has grown a lot of tentacles.)

> I was only referring to emergency situations

That was very unclear. When you wrote:

> Consider how 911 is but one service

that sure sounded to me like you were advocating making this information available very broadly.

I could be wrong, but I read "Consider how 911 is but one service" as advocating expanding the idea to other countries' emergency services, not necessarily more broadly within the US.

That’s exactly what I meant.

>> it's not even a hard choice: I'll take the former as by far the lesser of the two evils.

Right or wrong, I think you're in the extreme minority here.

Edit: I'm not necessarily speaking for myself here, but then I'm in a low-risk area and demographic, so am not especially likely to need 911. But I think the average "man on the street" would not give a second thought about it.

I don't know how "extreme" the minority is, but yes, most people seem to choose safety over freedom. It's a defensible choice. But it should be a choice, not the default assumption.

> most people seem to choose safety over freedom

I don't think that's true as often as our pessimistic sides would assume:

People risk their lives for freedom, in fighting wars, in challenging oppressors, in trying to escape. To say it more dramatically: A few people once agreed to risk their lives, their fortunes, and their honor for liberty, not the other way around.

No he is not. Do not confuse 'minority' with 'people comfortable expressing unpopular opinions'.

Except that they're often (usually?) one and the same. If the opinion was popular, it wouldn't be minority.

What scare you? That by calling 911 you allow them to see and hear what you do? It's easy to extrapolate and use the "slippery slope" argument but that doesn't make sense here.

It's an emergency, you are calling an emergency line. That line should have priority access to information while you are calling for help.

Don't want any of that?... Well I guess don't call the emergency line... or whatever...

How can I be sure that the underlying mechanism doesn't have a back door that allows anyone with access to track me all the time?

Your argument is very similar to the argument advanced by the government for key escrow and other backdoors in encryption systems: this mechanism will only be used with proper legal safeguards to catch "bad guys". Don't you want that?

No, I don't. I really don't.

How can you be sure your phone doesn’t have such a back door *now?

I don’t understand why you’d be ok with a cell phone as it stands today, but think that a cell phone which can send a bunch of data when you send 911 is completely unacceptable.

> How can you be sure your phone doesn’t have such a back door *now?

I can't.

> I don’t understand why you’d be ok with a cell phone as it stands today, but think that a cell phone which can send a bunch of data when you send 911 is completely unacceptable.

I didn't say that it's completely unacceptable. What I said was that talking about expanding this kind of data sharing is if there were a consensus that only good things could result scares me.

The reason I'm OK with my cell phone today is that the default assumption today is that my location is private, or at least under my control. There could be a back door, but that is a risk I'm willing to take.

What scares me is that we seem to be oozing slowly towards bringing up a whole generation who have never known privacy, and so have no idea what its value is.

> with my cell phone today is that the default assumption today is that my location is private, or at least under my control

Is that assumption accurate? Cell providers are already tracking your location and providing the data to resellers.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/tracking-firm-locationsm...

> Is that assumption accurate?

Yes. That's why 1) the story you linked to describes how users are prompted for consent and 2) the leakage of this data is sufficiently scandalous to be newsworthy.

I believe you are assuming that this feature would let the government request your geolocation on demand, but I don't think this is what they are actually suggesting: the idea is to make your phone automatically send your current coordinate after you make a call to 911.

That's the feature described in the original article. But the comment I was responding to advocates expanding that capability without any specified limits (except, perhaps, that it be limited to "emergency" situations, but "emergency" is a very malleable word).

I'm pretty sure they were describing a system where that additional information would be sent when calling 911, not that it could be activated remotely on command.

You should give me spare keys to your car, in case you can't find your current pair. It's okay if you're uncomfortable with that, because I might have already made a copy without your knowledge, so you should give me a copy anyway.

I don't understand this analogy. I'm not giving keys to anything, I'm just having my phone do some more stuff when I call 911. It's like saying I should have the ability to give you the keys to my car (which, I do!) or I should have the ability to make a video call (ditto).

There are valid reasons to call the emergency line when you are not the one experiencing the emergency, and thus you don't wish your privacy to be compromised.

I'm reminded a bit of the sanctuary city debate. Sanctuary cities are doing their best to let anyone call for help without worrying about whether immigration will be the first responders.

Anyway, I think there's some excessive paranoia in this discussion, but there is nonetheless a kernel of a valid point.

In fact the only times I ever called 911 I was calling for someone else, and I wanted my identity protected. If 911 would have broadcasted my identity I would not have called.

Can’t the government already locate phones for missing persons? I don’t know if that requires a warrant or what, but I seem to remember hearing about locating the last “ping” of a phone to a tower for many missing persons cases.

Yes, but that's very different from having the phone send out GPS coordinates, which are orders of magnitude more accurate. Also, there's no way to avoid triangulating your location from phone-tower pinging. That's just inherent in the way cell phones work. But sending GPS info is (or at least should be) optional.

> Can’t the government already locate phones for missing persons?

Yes, but in the past that's required a warrant. Has that changed?

I was envisioning a system where dialing 911 sent additional location data to the emergency service, but I can completely understand having serious concerns about the privacy cost and the other risks associated with any such system.

The government can already track you reasonably accurately using cell tower triangulation, and have been able to for decades.

If you're emitting any sort of signal, the government can track you. That ship sailed about 70 years ago.

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