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Comment by grumple | Hacker News Reader

Is there a use for this that isn’t to enable criminals?

I don’t see how you can have it both ways. Any privacy protections for the average law-abiding citizen is going to help out the criminals too.

The question is what the non-crime use case is. I can't think of such a thing. In any event, having your phone in an uber with a bunch of other phones and not following "normal" uber ride patterns would be yet another detectable pattern.

Yes, that model would be detectable, what does that get anyone though?

I found flaws with a lot of models, whether it was greater vulnerability of not getting your phone back, or having too many other phones in the same place.

I decided that more phones in the same and route was more tolerable.

But any model I didnt think of I’d like to read it.

> The question is what the non-crime use case is.

To protect against a tyrannical government.

In the case of a tyrannical government, it would be easy to detect use of this service and the tyrannical government would have an easy way of identifying "enemies of the state."

Of course. All privacy is like that. All encryptions is like that.

Depends on whether you consider the people doing warrantless tracking to be criminals.

Obviously people doing tracking with warrants will have useless data too and stop asking for that kind of dataset.

I like to think of it as phantom cloning. You physically could be where you normally are at home, or out somewhere else with no phone, or out somewhere else with a burner. All while what people normally use to identify you is moving around randomly.

There are plenty of times I wish I was connected but not tracked all the time because I get distracted with my device easily while Im just not used to being with no connectivity any more. Hiking, running errands, you name it.

Might as well pollute the data set for everyone else while you’re at.

I remember a former-NSA penetration tester telling me, a naive college hire, that for us to be successful developing BitLocker Drive Encryption, we’d have to make it good enough for terrorists to be willing to use it. It was a few years after 9/11 and that was a sobering conversation.

To protect against harassment: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2019/08/t-mobile-hands-over...

Yes. Protecting innocent people from getting caught in the fallout.

It seems the idea is to make (extended) phone tracking unviable and therefore stop the practice; not to enable criminals, but to avoid the side effect, which are perceived not worth the risk (in GPs opinion).

Maybe... phone walkers who scrape your data while charging and hand it over to the cops?

The innovation that the gig economy needs.

While everyone is worried about criminals, everyone else that wants to disconnect and has benign data is doing just fine.

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