That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What I find strange about this (common) question is that nobody seems to remember what they did before mobile phones. I got my first mobile phone in 2001, but it's not like I was chained to my house from birth until 2001.
I admit I might be more wary if I lived in a suburban or rural area where I could end up broken down in a car miles from civilization. Then a phone is a nice backup.
The $0.10 minutes that come with that aren't especially competitive with other prepaid services. I'm not sure they will activate a phone everywhere.
But the 'have a working phone' baseline isn't all that inconvenient or all that expensive.
The phone simply being turned on doesn't equate to more calls being made. Like the parent said, turn it on when you need it.
"The FCC's basic 911 rules require wireless service providers to transmit all 911 calls to a PSAP, regardless of whether the caller subscribes to the provider’s service or not." http://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services/
Doesn't cover calling a tow truck, AAA, or a friend or relative to come pick you up. But if you only use the phone for real life-threatening emergencies, you don't have to pay.
I can't off-hand think of anything where contacting me personally would be required in an "emergency situation", if it's really an "emergency" there's probably better qualified people to call. This is colored by my situation, I'm not a parent, I'm not the sole decision maker for anything mission critical (either personally or professionally). I'd be sad (or sadder) if my Mum or Dad died and I missed out on saying goodbye because nobody could contact me immediately, but they live 5hrs away from me so that's a pretty unlikely scenario.
I'm kinda "at peace" with spending time "uncontactable" anyway, I spend at least an hour a day (and sometimes 8 or 10 hours) on a motorcycle - where I might feel my phone ringing in my pocket, but I don't answer it until I've got to where I'm going and stopped the bike. I also treat the phone the same way in movies/restaurants/gigs/meetings, and often while deep in something complicated at work.
Personally, I don't buy into the idea that my phone is so other people can reliably contact me immediately in case of emergency. When work wants that, it's called "on-call" and they pay me for it. In my personal life, I answer my phone if and when it suits me, and I'm not enslaved to anybody who happens to have my number.
I've found out that most times when I "urgently" want to get a hold of someone - leaving a well thought out message works out just as fine.
I honestly can't believe it when people ask that question. It's such a scare tactic.
By itself, at least for me, this would probably really limit my social life. I'd miss spontaneous texts and calls like "I'm in your neighborhood, want to grab tea?" But I wonder if this airplane mode trick, plus a VoIP app, plus some kind of internet-based text message replacement, might solve the problem. Has anyone tried this?
And Google's Streetview wifi data hoovering means thay've got a pretty good database of wifi access points to geographic co-ordinates. And I bet they're not the only ones building that database. I'd bet pretty good money that there was no ethical oversight or data retention/protection policy in place befre this started: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/security/police-t...
Near as I can tell, the privacy threat here is very specific. You come within a few hundred feet of a hotspot, and for as long as you are in that location, the hotspot receives polling messages with your MAC address. The hotspot's operator can in theory log information like "device with MAC address 00:11:22:33:44:55 was within a few hundred feet of [hotspot location], Sat Jul 14 from 00:29:05 to 01:13:22".
How big of a threat this is depends on:
1. The difficulty of mapping a phone's MAC address to an individual. Do we know this is easy? Is there a big database with this information? A quick search suggests that it's possible to spoof the MAC address on a rooted phone, so it could be configured to change randomly every few hours. That would seem to defeat this attack on privacy, though doing so may be outside the technical know-how of most people.
2. How common is it for those who operate hotspots to log, aggregate and share this data? I'm confident the locally-owned cafe down the street doesn't log this data. What if it's something corporate-owned, like a Starbucks? Is this kind of logging, sharing and aggregating to track users just a theoretical possibility, or is it actually commonplace? I'd suspect the former.
I don't have answers to the questions I posed above. But barring evidence to the contrary, I strongly suspect that setting a smartphone to wifi only makes location tracking go from trivial to at least moderately difficult.
I suppose that you might be able to try tunneling all of your outbound data through a VPN tunnel, but at that point you might as well go back to using internet cafes and phone booths.
I prefer misdirection. Set up a device that will appear to be 'you' in many places at once. For instance, google and facebook both routinely believe that I commute from New York to London at least 15 times a day.
There is no doubt it inconvenient at times, but on the whole, I find my life better without one.
I think of them like cable TV - you're paying money for something to keep you in the daily grind of going to work, an you don't actually need it.
I spend a lot of time working at my laptop all day, and I don't want another full-blown computer in my pocket to suck my attention when I'm away from my laptop. Typically when I'm away from my laptop I'm busy with something--taking a walk in the park, drinking with frinds--that I don't want interrupted.
I also find that I can live perfectly fine without calls. I schedule things in advance with my girlfriend/friends, and email is enough for that. Maybe there's been one or two times in the past few years where I've really truly needed a phone (and I can't remember a specific case, but I assume there must have been such a time!).
The other thing they don't mention is disinformation. Phones do not use the encrypted GPS channel, they use the regular one. And spoofing it can make you phone think it is somewhere that it isn't. Cell tower data screws with that (since if you cross correlate to cell tower pings you end up with conflicting data sets) but within the range of a tower its eminently doable. The recent 'drone hijack' example had an idea of how much it costs ($1K) to build a reasonably high powered GPS spoofer, to spoof the phone in your pocket would take a very small one (and no sense screwing up your neighbors phone right?).
All we need are a couple of cases where the cell phone data "proves" you weren't in the area of a crime and blam!
I bought the pouch for software development reasons, not paranoia. One that works properly is something around $100 dollars. Leaving your phone in that kind of pouch is actually not that great for battery life, since I think the phone searches for towers on full radio strength. It's better just to activate airplane mode.
... of course before even tin "tinfoil" things were tough. Mother would be stood over her anvil in the kitchen battering the wrought iron over the tops of left-overs
IF that's the case: Wouldn't your solution turn the device into a pocket heater that dies a couple of hours early?
What is the benefit of this 'clever' solution, if all you really want seems to be to turn it off..?
Eventually it will happen.
Having total control over your own phone doesn't resolve the more fundamental problem that, in order to do basic tasks such as make calls or send text messages, you are dependent on a cell phone provier who then, through ordinary usage, is able to collect a terrifying amount of data about you.
They can triangulate your location whenever your phone is on and connected to their network (24/7 for most people), and have a full record of your calls, text messages, as well as all the data you send through their network.
> Thanks to the explosion of GPS technology and smartphone apps, these devices are also taking note of what we buy, where and when we buy it, how much money we have in the bank, whom we text and e-mail, what Web sites we visit, how and where we travel, what time we go to sleep and wake up — and more. Much of that data is shared with companies that use it to offer us services they think we want.
I have never heard of purchase history, bank balance, alarm clock settings (??? perhaps it refers to carriers supposedly tracking waking hours based on usage? that would make more sense, but is no different from dumb phones), or website history being tracked by anyone through a smartphone. "Whom we text" is tracked, but "whom we email" is worth highlighting as an item that cannot be tracked by a carrier without installing malware onto your phone, assuming you use encrypted email. (The credit card company is tracking your purchases, and email providers may be tracking your email, depending on privacy policy, whether you're using a smartphone or not, but that's irrelevant. I guess if you count Gmail's algorithms reading email to offer services "they think we want"... I don't.)
> Scholars have called them minicomputers and robots. Everyone is struggling to find the right tag, because “cellphone” and “smartphone” are inadequate.
That "phone" doesn't adequately describe modern smartphones is a valid point, but has literally nothing to do with tracking.
> Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, argues that they are robots for which we — the proud owners — are merely the hands and feet. “They see everything, they’re aware of our position, our relationship to other human beings and other robots, they mediate an information stream around us,” he has said.
Colorful, but ridiculously vague. There are many different types of information and they are all stored differently. With the possible exception of Facebook, there is no entity that sits up high reading all your stuff without a court order, and if you want to have completely secure conversations through email or other means it's easy to do so.
> A recent survey by O2, a British cell carrier, showed that making calls is the fifth-most-popular activity for smartphones; more popular uses are Web browsing, checking social networks, playing games and listening to music. Smartphones are taking over the functions that laptops, cameras, credit cards and watches once performed for us.
Also irrelevant to tracking.
> Turning it off when you’re not using it will also help, because it will cease pinging your location to the cell company, but are you really going to do that? Shutting it down does not even guarantee it’s off — malware can keep it on without your realizing it. The only way to be sure is to take out the battery. Guess what? If you have an iPhone, you will need a tiny screwdriver to remove the back cover. Doing that will void your warranty.
If you are really concerned about malware preventing you from turning off your iPhone, you can hold down the home and power buttons to turn it off without going through software.
> “Don’t have a cellphone or just accept that you’re living in the Panopticon.”
A third alternative is to wear a tinfoil hat which will stop all the tracking???
> There is another option. People could call them trackers.
Okay but if hackers start hijacking peoples' sessions can we start calling them tracker-jackers?
Edit: Or more to the point - this is like calling all passerby "government agents" because they can be required to testify in court.
The word "tracker" doesn't roll off the tongue very well and I think it suffers from the same flaw that the article criticizes about "phone", namely that it focuses on a specific aspect of a multi-purpose device. Node seems a much better choice since it connotes all the important aspects of a smart phone:
- Connection to a network for the purpose of information sharing
- Being identifiable and addressable
- Processing capabilities
I wonder if Google are collecting geo-spacial data about your social graph? I suspect they could, if they wanted to, work out which section of your online social network are people you meet in real life, and which are people you only interact with on-line?
"Tracker" simply ignores all the service aspects of the device and focuses on a single use for one of the parties involved (costumer, carrier, manufacturer). In that respects it is just as misleading a term as "phone".