Hacker News Reader

Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

I've been not carrying a phone with me lately, not because of tracking fears, but out of a sort of experiment to see if I really need to be connected in the relatively short distances between my laptop having a wifi connection (which it has at home, at the office, in coffee shops, on trains, etc.). I suppose avoiding this dragnet is a nice bonus, but I wonder how long it'll be until not carrying a phone gets registered as somehow suspicious in itself.

View on HN

I haven't had a phone for something like 3 or 4 years. (I did briefly have a Nokia brick that I used maybe once or twice to make calls, but mostly as an alarm clock without a sim card.)

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!).

I've not had a cell phone at all in 6 years. My last one was the veritable Nokia 5110.

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.

This is how I get by without having a smartphone. My friends have given me a hard time since I tend to forget my phone at home more often than I forget my laptop at home.

You could also turn off 3G/4G and calls on your smartphone, but keep wifi. I just tried this on my Android ICS phone and it's pretty easy to accomplish. Enable airplane mode — which will disable calls, data and wifi — then re-enable wifi. The device can't text or call, but loading websites works.

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?

You can probably still be located by wifi access point.

How would that work? Are you suggesting 3+ of the access points within range working together to triangulate me, and saving that information, along with the phone's MAC address or similar?

It is laughable, isn't it? If they're needing wifi to triangulate you chances are they already know where you are anyways.

Hmmm. If I were a "cut-the-corners to the borders of being bent" cop (al la McNulty from Wired), I'd consider dropping cheap access points around places where I'd like to know if my "suspects" frequented, with SSIDs that matched local free wifi sources so that if a target had ever connected to the free wifi at the local McDonalds or Starbucks, their phone might automatically hook up to my "cloned" version of those hotspots. You'd be able to capture mac addresses from connection attempts, or being a little more evil - you could log any resulting traffic (and mitm ssl connections too, I wonder how many smartphone email/IM/socialnetwork apps do strong certificate checking?)

A single access point coupled with a typically lousy phone wifi antenna's range, narrows you down to well under a few hundred feet in my experience.

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...

How is Google's wifi data relevant here? Unless Google themselves operate the hotspot, they won't know what devices polled it or connected to it.

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.

The hotspot also passes data back to the handset, which can identify it individually. If the hotspot location is previously known that gives you coordinates. In dense areas like New York, you're within range of multiple AP's on a fairly constant basis, allowing for real time triangulation. This is why google maps prompts you to turn on wifi to improve location, even though you are not connecting to the Internet through the AP's.

Yeah, but doesn't that work by polling the APs then sending the poll results to Google over 3G/4G? If data is off how could this work?

For almost all smartphones, almost all of the time, 3g data will be on. Your objection above was that location tracking would require MAC to person mapping and the cooperation of innumerable hotspot operators. This is not the case.

We've got a reading comprehension issue. You're responding to my post about how easily you can disable data on an Android smartphone, which I proposed as a way to avoid tracking.

I yes, I missed your GGP. But it still doesn't work. If you actively use a hotspot then IP GEO tracks you. If you use wireless data then you can be tracked by cell tower triangulation by the network operator, by GPS, and also by passive wifi tracking that we've been discussing.

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's also the problem that if your phone uses the hotspots internet connection, anything it connects to gets the ip address of the hotspot - and Google (and probably Apple, and quite likely several law enforcement agencies) can look up the geographic location of that ip address. I haven't looked to see how chatty my iPhone is when it gets a wifi internet connection, but I strongly suspect iMessage pings Apple with some unique identifier for my phone whenever it can. I'd be surprised if there wasn't some similar "phone home" process for an Android phone with an associated Google account as well. Google and Apple _probably_ won't roll over to a request from some curious local small-town cop, but I'd guess most three-letter-agencies can get pretty quick access to data about my phone if they ask the right way…

What are your plans in case of emergencies?

What kinds of emergencies? I live in a pretty densely populated city, so there are basically always people around. I guess I'd just yell for help in the worst case? But if I'm not literally incapacitated in a gutter, I'd walk to the nearest police station, hospital, metro station, or 24-hour 7/11. Or knock on an apartment door to request help.

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.

Even in a sparsely populated area, you could keep your phone in your car, turned off, and just turn it on if you did have an emergency.

...While paying for it the whole time.

Prepaid phone?

Minutes always expire. You are forced to buy a certain amount every few months.

Tmobile prepaid is $100 a year.

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.

We don't all live in a country that has T Mobile

You're still 'paying for it the whole time' regardless of whether the phone is turned on or off, assuming you're on a plan.

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.

My point is that if you don't have one at all, you pay nothing.

You can call 911 even if you don't pay for cell service. We gave my grandmother an old, deactivated cell phone just for that purpose.

"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.

Emergencies like your parents having a heart attack. When someone needs to reach you quickly, not the other way around.

While I'd appreciate being notified if a parent has a heart attack, there's a whole bunch of more important people that need to be called before me - get them an ambulance before you call me - and, truth is, there's very little I could do in terms of "emergency response" anyway.

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.

This is the healthiest view I've seen in the comments for this article - so far.

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.

This is only an issue because it is possible and as a result we are infantilising ourselves. If you cannot be contacted over something that you would find important, this is not a tragedy, even if the circumstances are tragic. Before telephones, people would still travel all over the world and would only find out things like this by letter, sometimes months after the event.

At what point did that question become relevant to every facet of life?

I honestly can't believe it when people ask that question. It's such a scare tactic.

...when you have kids and attempt to live a life away from home?

I've been out of my home country for > 6 years, have lived and worked in 3 countries in that time, and spent 2 years driving through 16 more. Does that qualify?

Right, and it's not like the people who somehow existed before cell phone technology magically perished because of these supposed emergencies. We are not helpless creatures here, sheesh.

FWIW my question wasn't meant to be a scare tactic. I genuinely wanted to know what the plan was in case of emergencies. I suppose I could have (and should have, since HN seems to value explicitness and literalism) elaborated to avoid assumption and/or presumption.

What was the plan of your parents and grandparents in case of emergencies?

Don't buy in to the fear mentality that's strangling American discourse. People were dealing with emergencies just fine without cell phones... just 15 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com