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Your Cell Phone Is Tracking You
PollGuy writes "I had never heard until this article in the New York Times (sacrifice of first born required) about services that let regular people track the locations of other regular people via their cell phones. Nor this: 'A federal mandate that wireless carriers be able to locate callers who dial 911 automatically by late 2005 means that millions of phones already keep track of their owners' whereabouts.'"
this service isnt really new, i bought my phone about a year ago (samsung a500, sprintpcs) and it had this feature. I disabled it, but i think that only turns off the ability for joe schmoe to track me, not the gov't.
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i personally see a good use for this (911) and dont see the big deal since you could just not carry your cell with you for that ultra-top-secret-underground tinfoil hat clan meeting.
i am more worried about things you cannot opt out of, like face scanning in public places. or non-approval required phone taps etc
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
they have been able to do this for a long time by triangulating on your location from 3 or more different cells. Every criminal knows not to leave their cell phone on exactly for this reason.
Investing forum
Just keep telling yourself that. If it's enabled for 911, it's enabled period. All it takes is a warrant (OnStar anyone?) or a clever cracker/spammer.
Spouses should not have the ability to spy on one another either.
Can now. It's called a private detective.
Without guidelines, tracking very well might become widespread because it is forced down the throats of people who get their cell phones through their companies, schools, or otherwise don't pay their own bill.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
um, so "able to call regardless of credit" is enabled for 911/999, so "able to call regardless of credit" is enabled period?
woot, FREE CALLS FOR EVERYONE!!!!11111
On the other hand, what's wrong with telling employees that the phone reports back to a tracking map? When they're on company time their true location should not be a secret to their boss, so there really isn't too much of a privacy concern... only those who have something to hide should be worried. If they want to go somewhere secret on their off hours, leave the business phone at home...
Of course this technology has legitimate uses. If you'd bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that the privacy advocates were not objecting to the technology itself, but to the absence of control over who gets access to the data.
I think GPS in phones is a great idea. Aside from the fact that it would make emergency calls much more efficient, it would be handy when using it with a PDA (you'd get both GPS and Network in one peripheral). Having a two-in-one would also simplify tracking-device projects. Don't you think it would be totally nerdy cool to be able to enter an AT command to your phone and get GPS coordinates, or throw it into a NMEA mode?
The issue of providers tracking you is a completely separate problem. As long as the user remains in control (ie, I can choose to allow my phone to transmit GPS information to my provider or caller), then we're fine. Personally I'd have it always set to never allow another party to get my (x,y) unless I was using an emergency call. The rest of the time I'd be using the GPS capability with a local device for my own needs. We just need to ensure that phones don't go "DRM-style", where they are doing things against your will.
>I think GPS in phones is a great idea.
It may be a great idea if a mother is tracking her child. It's not such a great idea if a stalker is doing the same.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
The point is, they could. If they don't have the tools to do so, then they definately can't. This gives the government a easy tool to track people, especially as cell phone use becomes more and more widespread (as if it isn't already.)
While someone may not be sitting there tracking every movement, it would be feasible to assume that all your data gets dumped into a database for later use. We already store incoming and outgoing calls, why not locations?
Let's say a robbery took place at a store. You were on the other side of the building and didn't see it. However, the resolution of the GPS wasn't good enough to pinpoint which side of the building you were on, only that you were in proximity. The police come knocking on your door, and now your a suspect.
I go to public parks often to sit and read. I have no kids. I don't want some stupid computer program to assume I have no reason to be there, flagging me as a pedophile because I happen to read on kids playgrounds.
When you call 911 on a cell phone, chances are good that a) you will be in a poorly-defined location (ie, "I'm underneath the tire of a car!"), and b) you will need a speedy response. Why must you be forced to describe your location well enough for police to find you, instead of simply lettimg them track your phone and show up to where you called?
Calling 911 implies it's an emergency, you need the police NOW.
I'm sorry, but an important part of growing up is getting at least a taste of true freedom and yes, sometimes the risk that it entails. . When I was a teenager I probably did a few things my parents wouldn't have approved of, and I that was an important part of my experience.
I can't imagine imposing this on my own teenager, except (1) when he actively wants it, if say he goes into a strange part of town, or (2) as punishment if he gets into trouble - part of the punishment might be that he would be monitored for the next two months or whatever. If he wants to be monitored all the time,
Wow! Your phone book tells you where the person you are calling is, even when they are out of the house??
I gotta get me one of them!
For what it's worth, many years ago when I crossed paths with some cell-phone product design types, there was a hybrid product concieved, originally to improve service and battery life -- a pager/cell phone. (We're not talking SMS here, but plain old POCSAG paging.)
Anyway, with this approach you could work if you wished to retain positional anonymity -- have a conventional pager (which is just a reciever) notify you of calls, then choose to power up the cell or not.
As practically every other post has pointed out, positioning by radio has no requirement of GPS being present. Any transmitter can be position located. Amateur radio opertators actually have contests to do this -- foxhunts -- and the equipment to do position finding of non-spread-spectrum tranmitters is pretty trivial to make or buy.
If you want your whereabouts to remain unknown, don't transmit. Simple as that.
Okay, when I originally got my sprintpcs-capable phone, a Sanyo 4900, I read up on the location feature and it essentially told you that if you turned it off, the only ones who would have access to your location info would be the police. I didn't like the way it sounded, and between the bad ears and Big Brother, it went back to The Shack inside a day.
I later bought the same phone again and decided to use a headset for the hearing problem.
The real problem with the technology is not that the cops can track you. As far as I know, they have *always* had that ability: the machinery knows that the signal from your phone is strongest between n points on the network and if you make a call, your approximate location is knowable by the system in realtime.
Another problem, of course, are what they keep mentioning on 'Law and Order,' your LUDs or 'Local Usage Details.' It's a record of everyone you call and everyone who calls you.
Big hint, before calling anyone for a criminal transaction from your own cell phone, try on some bright-orange clothing and make sure you look good in it. It is one of the stupidest things you could possibly do--especially when you can buy anonymous, 'pay-as-you-go' cell phone service for minor amounts of money.
The real problem that the 'Law-and-Order' people, the ones who never met a form of privacy they didn't loath, is not that the cops can track you, illegally search you, or sweat a false confession out of you. All in all, American police can be great, but they can and have done all these things at one time or another.
The problem with technology is that the law is a game and it has to be a game for it to work. It would be bad for society if it were possible to automatically find someone guilty and technology is bringing us closer to the day when that will be possible in more and more areas.
From traffic-cams to face-recognition software, technologies are bringing us closer to a national security state where you don't do only good things because you want to, but because common sense tells you you should be scared shitless of doing anything else.
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"Yeah. It smells, too..."
This is the wrong example to use. A more correct example would run something like this:
"Mister Anderson, our records indicate that you spent a portion of last night attending a political rally for a certain political candidate. You should realize the policies promoted by that candidate would be detrimental to the corporate objectives of this organization and could result in our having to terminate certain employees. You have a choice to make, Mister Anderson, do I make myself clear?"
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.