Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

I have a small site dedicated to providing information about gps/cell phone tracking. As part of that, I've been doing a bit of reading about cell phone tracking capabilities.

It amazes me that we are turning our phones into better tracking systems than we've ever used on wild animals. Whether it's sound fingerprinting, gps, WiFi tracking, or now magnetic disturbance tracking, your phone's location services is getting so it can tell within a few feet where you are at all times. (By 2016 FCC regulations make it a requirement that all phones locate themselves within 100m or so)

This has amazing potential for startups. If your phone knows you are at the gym, it can start your workout routine. If you are at the library, it can decrease the ringer volume. Now with inter-building location ramping up, the opportunities will only increase.

On a related note, this information can be requested by law enforcement without a warrant. Last year cell carriers handled over a million such requests. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/us/cell-carriers-see-uptic...

People wearing little electronic devices that allow law enforcement to determine their position and travel patterns over any period of time just by filling out a form and without a warrant. If you had told me 20 years ago this is where we'd be, I would have called you a paranoid nut-job.

The kicker will be when they can do this, even when we've flipped the off switch. For now, there's always the off switch.

One of the things I was curious about is whether the phone can be enabled remotely by the telco. I found conflicting information on the web. I suspect it can, but this is not something the carriers want to talk about. Just a suspicion, though. I imagine what happens 99% of the time is that the user doesn't want anything to do with tech like gps tracking, but then they find an app that does something cool, and it things like gps to be turned on in order for it to work. So in a way, just like Facebook is destroying privacy by "helping" folks share, many apps are destroying the anonymity of location and travel by "helping" folks with cool apps. That kinda sucks. Wish the situation were different.

Note that location services comprises many different technologies, not all of which can be turned off. Many of them are required for the phone to operate. The upcoming FCC regs, for instance, require 100m self-locating ability to always be on. I guess for things like 911 service?

Speaking of paranoia, there's also rumors that the FBI/black helicopter/MIB bunch can actually power-up your phone remotely, especially with some models. This sounds completely out-of-left-field to me, but who knows? Court docs show they can use your phone as a listening device even when you're not calling somebody, so I wouldn't put other things along these lines past them. There's probably a good reason Osama Bin Laden refused to have anybody associated with him possess a cell phone, whether it was used, had a battery in it, or not. Seems like I read something somewhere once about illuminating electronics gear with microwaves, then reading the signature of the radiation emitted. But it could have been in a pulp sci-fi novel. As I said, it's difficult to tell where reality ends and paranoia begins with this because reality is quickly catching up to the paranoia of just a few years ago. Who would have imagined sub-meter resolution on where you are? That's almost accurate enough to tell if you're wearing the phone in your jacket pocket or on your belt. Crazy stuff.

The SIM and baseband have absolute control on the rest of the phone, which doesn't make sense except for enabling this kind of surveillance capability. False/partial shutdowns or spontaneous wakeups of the radio portion would probably be noticed by this point, so it doesn't make sense that either would be enabled except in a targeted way.

I would think the capability of having an Off phone receive a radio signal to turn itself On would require pretty deliberate hardware design.

I do remember reading about locally fingerprinting an Off phone based on its passive radio response, and this seems feasible.

When the phone is On, total location privacy is out the window, as Ma Bell always knows what towers you're near and can triangulate. Everything else you've said can be (and probably is) implemented in invisible layers of software.

End-to-end privacy would be a nice step forward, but assuring this requires an auditable interface between the radio transceiver and the computer/sensors. Any fix for the location problem involves decoupling identity/billing from the physical infrastructure.

>I would think the capability of having an Off phone receive a radio signal to turn itself On would require pretty deliberate hardware design.

Wake on LAN (WoL) is a pretty common feature for network chipsets. I don't know anything about mobile networks (so take this as the semi-educated speculation that it is), but it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine WoL over 3G. It wouldn't have to be a feature advertised to end users of the SoC.

What it comes down to is "what does 'off' mean on a cell phone?"

Too bad there aren't reliable cell towers and WiFi where a lot of wild animals live. :)

Yeah, and I hear Verizon's coverage map doesn't look so hot when you're a few hundred feet under water.

true but GPS don't work well either so that is one of the real uses for this technology approach, if it's not being used already.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com