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Tracking People Via Cell Phone
An anonymous reader writes "According to the articleat the Guardian the UK Government have been working on a project to use the widely available mobile phone masts as a form of localised radar to track both people and vehicles without their knowledge.
Supposedly there is even work on the way to give this project the ability to see through walls!
Maybe Philip K. Dick was right to be paranoid about governments."
Isn't this old news? I thought the US had been doing this for some time now, in order to ensure that 911 callers from a mobile could be located.
As far as I am concerned, not having a cell phone is a status symbol...
love is just extroverted narcissism
Far to much power is being consolidated in far to few people.
Give everyone this tech and everyone would spy on each other for a year or two, then it would be common and boring. (except in small towns, where people would like to know the last time the neigbors wiped their ass.)
Yes, this is "an invasion of privacy", but what is the big deal? Does eeryone think that they are so important that the government wants to spy on them? Gimme a break!
... so I don't mind this. If anything, this is a tool that could help protect me and the other millions of innocent people from those people that do have something to hide ...
... * please don't flame me too harshly *
I don't have anything to hide
Some food for thought
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Nope this is different - read the article. It's basically radar but using cellphone transmissions as the source signal, so you don't need to put up radar transmitters everywhere because the telcos have done it for you.
You mean OnStar. OnStar has a GPS built in. I believe LoJack works differently by transmitting a signal that specially equipped police cars pick up when the are within a certain distance of the LoJack transmitter. Whereas OnStar is pleased as punch to send your location to the GM OnStar location.
If your truly paranoid -- don't buy a vehicle with OnStar. While it has its uses, and I'm glad my mother-in-law has it in case something goes wrong while she's by herself, I sure don't want it in my car.
I wonder how many requests for support the OnStar office gets to track cars? The use of the information from OnStar equipped vehicles are not reported on very often.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
I don't agree with your post.
It's not a typical Slasdottian/geek attitude, it's very important to think about civil rights. This has nothing to do with fingerprints. Fingerprints are taken if you are suspected of having commited something illegal.
Location tracking of cellphones is something completely different:
it can be automated, you don't realize that you are being tracked, it's easy to abuse.
A cellphone is a radio beacon, and it is designed to localize you to enable roaming an such. If you don't want people to be able to track you, you don't continually post your whereabouts to the world. You might as well be wearing a clown suit and shooting flare guns.
Read the article. Holy crap!
This is not tracking where your phone is. That's old hat.
This is using the cellphone signal radiation as an imaging system, like radar or x-rays. Except always on, everywhere. Anyone who walks or drives within range would be imaged.
Sure it would be low res and only show large and/or moving objects like people and cars but It's quite the panopticon. i.e. everyting everwhere is seen.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
you can be triangulated on. You don't have to be talking. Since your cell phone has to announce it's availability to local cells so that it can receive incoming calls, you can be found. Not as invasive as the GPS phones or this cell phone radar, but still not comfort inducing. So if you're concerned (and you know who you are), shut off that phone.
Would be a way to sneak in speeding tickets with no extra roadside equipment except a camera to identify the speeder.
A related use would be to tell cops where "speeding hot spots" are, so they can go hide there.
Really, this technology doesn't scare me very much. It's nothing they couldn't already do. Even the Libertarian in me has a hard time getting too riled up over this. There are bigger battles to fight than this.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Yeah, or even Thomas Jefferson. Or the ancient Greeks.
-Peter
In the past, all or most of technology-related privacy concerns have differed from this one in a single simple aspect: you basically had to be an active user of whatever technology was exploiting your privacy to be vulnerable to it. Therefore in order for your credit card to be stolen online, it needed to, at some point be transmitted via an online purchase or transaction. More to the point, you actually had to OWN a credit card. A person with all his wealth in gold buried in his back yard had nothing to fear from hackers and the Y2K bug.
Similarly, spam, web tracking, email monitoring, phone tapping, phone-based GPS geo-location; all of these invasions could, by eschewing the technologies involved and choosing to live a simpler, less connected life, be avoided. The sacrifice involved was significant, but not unmanagable.
If technologies like these become acceptable forms of populace control, this axiom of "it only affects you if you use it" will no longer apply. A technophobe with no phone line and no electricity living in a cold-water flat in London will still be vulnerable to electronic espionage. The current range of this technology is anywhere cellular service is available. Considering I was able to make a call this summer from the peak of a 5000 meter isolated mountain top in the remote Italian alps, I find this idea truly terrifying.
The UK has, in recent years, been a bellweather for survaillance practices worldwide. As an American citizen beginning to see the sort of widespread video survaillance now common to those living in England, I make a simple plea to any UK citizens reading: Do anything within your power to stop this. Write letters, mail threatening powders, strip in front of parliment. (Note: don't mail powder. thats a bad idea) Anything to keep this idea from gaining a foothold. I ask this of you so that you aren't subjected to it, but also so that it doesn't eventually bleed into my country.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
No, because of the fact that human tissue is a lossy dielectric, you could not track individuals unless they are carrying something that could tx a signal or at least bounce the signal back.
From the article The system, used alongside technology which allows individuals to be identified by their mobile phone handsets, will mewan that individuals can be located and their movements watched on a screen from hundreds of miles away.
alsoThe technology 'sees' the shapes made when radio waves emitted by mobile phone masts meet an obstruction. Signals bounced back by immobile objects, such as walls or trees,
by the way, trees also would not relect radio waves if I am correct....... Remember, radio waves pass through things... otherwise you couldn't use your cellular phone in, your car, or, your house... etc.....
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}