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Comment by Jonnax | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to say that "oh, phone calls have no security at all, what do you expect?"

It's true that we can talk to friends and family with internet services.

But for businesses we use our phones. Personally I don't think I would affected if my call records were given to anyone or leaked.

But I can think of scenarios where it could be really damaging to someone.

Like imagine a celebrity was having cancer treatment they didn't want people to know. Their call.records get leaked to a tabloid who infer their calls to a clinic mean that they have cancer and run an article.

I can imagine that would be a painful experience.

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"Personally I don't think I would affected if my call records were given to anyone or leaked."

You may be personally affected by your elected representatives or people in positions of power in industry being blackmailed into making certain decisions.

So you may not be directly "personally affected", but you can certainly be indirectly "personally affected".

Of course. Like I can say that if my call records leaked out it would be boring but of course not everyone is in the same position.

I remember reading an article about a developer who started replacing Android on his phones because his office was located in the same building as a psychiatrist and the Google hivemind had identified him as a patient.

The fact that this is legal is really troubling.

I can believe it, Google pestered me to review a bubble tea place I drive by every day. I've never stopped there and never will but I continued to get the popup until I finally gave the place a 1-star rating just to shut Google up. Not really fair to the business but I was sick of seeing that notification.

I do wonder about that, I live next door to a pub and it has shown me checking in multiple times in as I walked past.

I do go in a few times a month around four or five times, but god only knows what google probably thinks.

Wouldn’t it be more likely they’d infer he was a doctor? I wouldn’t expect patients to go every day for 8 hours. (Not saying either is “ok”, but guessing patient from those facts is particularly poor I think)

There are likely more patients than doctors, so the inference is statistically correct.

That depends on what population selection data you choose to consider/admit.

As an example, suppose a cell phone appears at the local supermarket/grocery store every weekday from 9 AM to 5 PM. If you conclude that phone is owned by an extremely avid supermarket shopper rather than a store manager, you're ignoring the persistence over time dimension.

If you claim that it's more likely a cashier rather than a store manager (because there are more cashiers than managers), you're on much firmer ground than if you claim it's more likely a shopper than a store manager just because there are wildly more shoppers than managers.

As a developer, they probably had inferred his profession correctly from his search history.

It should also absolutely know that there is a dev company in the building too - and it could tell that they were there based upon the same evidence as the psychiatrists office.

For business phones, call records of salespeople would be valuable information for your competitors.

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