Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Just bought a phone for my wife tonight and I was interested to see that it has GPS included. Interesting privacy and safety issue.
Suddenly I wish I hadn't sold my old Nokia phones on eBay recently. They might have been worth much more in the next couple years when all phones come with GPS-tracking included. Of course, it wouldn't make much of a difference if providers require the feature in the future.
So long as the high standards to get a warrant still exist, that's not a bad thing for the world to have. It's a whole lot cheaper for the taxpayer to grab somebody's cell phone records compared to the conventional police tail...
I work (outsourced) for a major telecom manufacturer that's been mentioned two times before in these responses. A majority of our phones as well as our competitions' have the ability to track a user. It's not GPS, it's triangulation. a spot between any three available towers can be pinpointed to within thiry feet. Works out great for e911 services, in the areas that can access them (most major metropolitan areas). Also, these services cannot be turned off. The location-based services can be interrupted on a limited basis so that advertisements and offers (coming soon through your telecom companies) will not reach your phone, but e911 will always have access. Interesting to think that the avarge user is starting to get access to these services, however. (Don't know if I want all my friends and relatives to be able to plot out a map of my whereabouts.) ...just food for thought....
We have been able to do this in Norway for a couple of years now, and everyone could track each other, if they are on the persons white-list. (That is, you could say who you would like to be tracked by)
I haven't really been up to date on the latest cell tech, but maybe a few of you who are can address what I'm wondering about -
The signal from the GPS satellites is pretty weak...How does the cell phone reliably get its coordinates? Most of the handheld GPS units I have used will lose GPS lock if you have it in the car, in buildings or even under trees because of the line-of-sight obstruction. If you require E911 service, the chances are pretty good you will be in a location that doesn't get very hot GPS reception. Is there some kind of secondary location service?
Antennas must be tuned for optimum reception of a signal, which means that in a GPS enabled cell phone there is probably two antennas - one for GPS and one for cell service. Can anyone confirm that theory? It could theoretically use the same antenna for both GPS and cell service, but either way if you wanted to disable it you could cut the trace that carries the signal to the GPS controller.
But if you do this, how legal would that be?
-R
Turning it off "when you don't want to be tracked" implies a period, however brief, when being tracked is a-o-k. I don't personally mind if anyone watches me go from my house to work, and back again every single day, but then, some jobs have higher security concerns than "Dietary Aide"...
To everyone who is freaking out that this will be a new way to for The Man (or government, employer, spouse, whatever) to track your every movement, I have a radical new idea:
Don't carry the cell phone
This may never have occurred to you, but if you are doing something or going somewhere and do not want to be tracked, you actually have the option of not carrying the cell phone with you. Now I know what you are thinking, but yes, your pants will stay up without the cell phone holster connected to your belt. Try it in the safety of your own home if you do not believe me. And legend has it our ancestors traveled across the country side without cell phones back in the olden days.
Or for a less radical option, just turn it off. If you still do not believe it is really off and could still be tracking you, take the battery out.
Finkployd
What if you're that person that everyone talks about when you're not around? I've found out because people tell me about these conversations.
What if you're that hot girl that everyone wants to meet, and you despise all those creepy geeks? All of a sudden you keep bumping into the same stalkers, at every club you go to, at every store you visit. Everytime you step out of the house?
Cool, so don't carry your cell-phone with you. Great solution, now that they've eliminated most public pay-phones. You too can live in a communications-free world. Hello? It's like stepping back in time a 100 years. It's particularly disabling when your car breaks down, and nobody will stop to help you - and there's no phone around to call for help. It's a problem when people *expect* to be able to reach you at anytime - you become a social pariah.
Time for a new solution. We just need to out-innovate these stupid restrictions.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
For privacy freaks this is old, old news. It is also one of things that give us freaks bad dreams and sleepless nights. The 911 justification has all the ear-marks of that tried-and-true privacy buster maxim - "If it will save the life of just one child, it will all be worth it!"
BUT, after cogitating on it for a few years now, I think that the decision to go with GPS has a lot of benefits for us freaks (and the criminals out there too). Since the trend is towards embedded GPS in cell phones, it is likely that all the typical anti-privacy black hats will build their uber-spying systems on the back of assuming the GPS data is valid. It does not have to be.
In fact, I envision a GPS "relocator" device becoming somewhat popular in the same stores that sell mini-spy cams, electronic bugs and electronic bug detectors. Just attach your relocator to your phone and it will overpower the signals from the GPS birds with its own false signals and convince the phone that it is really somewhere else. Similarly, I would expect to see software only hacks to future phones to do the same thing. As long as the dark powers that be are too lazy to cross reference the phone's own reported GPS location with the actual cell towers in use (and you know that such laziness *will* prevail it is government agencies we are talking about) then those people who want to appear as if they are somewhere else can do so easily. Thus invalidating much of the benefits (beyond the stupid 911 misdirection) to Big Brother and helping to maintain the privacy of the common man (and all those criminals the Feds thought they were going to be able to use this scheme against).
Hey, just because you wear a tinfoil hat doesn't mean you can't see the brighter side.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Several messages here have covered the topic of persons/authorities beeing able to spot your current location.
Actually, it goes much farther. I dont' know about other countries, but here in Denmark, your location can not only be found but is actually continuously logged by the phone companys "for accounting purposes".
I know at least two criminal trials were these logs have been used by the prosecutor to prove that the accused was at a given location several months or even a year earlier.
I generally agree with your statements, except for two areas of American Society which gives me the screaming willies.
The first, and most apparent to anyone conscious today, it the potential use, mis-use, and outright abuse that something like this will have under the honarable practice of Marketing. Ever seen Minority Report? The scenes where they tracked advertisements based on the people looking at them freaked me out.
With GPS, as with the recently announced plans for radio signal tracking, they can start gathering demographics on people who are driving past a give billboard and modify the advertisement content to match your assigned pidgeon hole.
Now, even more of the ads you see are directed to you based on someone elses assumptions. Kind of like have a 1x1 pixel following you everywhere you go.
I just realized how fundamentally fucked up this really is. Because all of my advertisement exposure is focused on narrow beam that's all about me, or an assumption thereof, I will be severely restricted on seeing anything that isn't "all about me".
What this leads to is a complete unfamiliarity with anything that isn't about me. This results in an increased Social Intolerance that everyone claims to be so precious to our Melting Pot Society. Hand it to Marketing to practically endorse segregation, but not limited to a Skin-Color level of segregation.
The second aspect of this that is scarey but not as tangible is the rampant abuse we are already forcing upon anyone The Administration wants to label as a Terrorist, Enemy of the State, or Enemy Combatant. Once labeled, you may never get out from under it. I'm pretty certain that this is how McCarthyism got started in the 1950's.
While this may sound far fetched, dramatic, and theatrical, you should probably ask yourself the question, "What exists in our Government which is going to effectively prevent this from happening??
It's true, Europe generally trails the US in all things stupid, but in one respect we're showing you how dangerous life can be:
http://www.mapamobile.com/
"mapAmobile is a service which can give you the peace of mind of knowing where your children, loved ones or colleagues are at any time, without intruding on their day to day activity. It uses the mobile phone network to locate a mobile phone anywhere in the UK. You can access this information from this website, via text message, via WAP or by making a simple phone call."
If you have secrets, ANY secrets, especially BUSINESS secrets, under NO circumstances mention anything over the telephone!
1 0. html
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit200307
"The typical CALEA installation on a Siemens ESWD or a Lucent 5E or a Nortel DMS 500 runs on a Sun workstation sitting in the machine room down at the phone company. The workstation is password protected, but it typically doesn't run Secure Solaris. It often does not lie behind a firewall. Heck, it usually doesn't even lie behind a door. It has a direct connection to the Internet because, believe it or not, that is how the wiretap data is collected and transmitted. And by just about any measure, that workstation doesn't meet federal standards for evidence integrity.
And it can be hacked.
And it has been.
Israeli companies, spies, and gangsters have hacked CALEA for fun and profit, as have the Russians and probably others, too. They have used our own system of electronic wiretaps to wiretap US, because you see that's the problem: CALEA works for anyone who knows how to run it."
...here's another dirty little secret of the wireless industry: many phones have the ability to enable the microphone without the owner of the phone even knowing it. I only recently heard about this, and I can't vouch for how valid it is (I don't have much intimate knowledge about how cell handsets work), but even if it isn't true today, it's interesting to consider the possibility that cell phone users are carrying 'bugs' around with them 24/7...
You'd have to be liable for the charges if you abused the system, and the "button" would really have to be something like a pull-out slip so i would be both permanent and hard to set off by accident, but imagine what a help it would be.
It makes you wonder why the US government mandated GPS. It adds to the cost of the phone and it could have been done other ways - like yours. Maybe one of the GPS hardware companies donated some money to *cough* get the law passed.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
While I agree with most of your post, I have to disagree with this line. That is the promoted use of it, and is quite a good use. However, there's a not-so-well hidden agenda of advertising. When I got my new phone, Verizon was specifically saying that they have plans to use the system to provide "location-based services". That is, based on your location they will send advertisements and instant coupons for nearby businesses.
"John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right now."
Emergency services are also provided, as a way to convince people we need this. You want to be safe don't you? Fortunately, my phone (and many other models, I'm sure) give me the option to transmit the aGPS data with every call or just with calls to 911. This is something I can live with. The service is there when I have a real emergency, but (unless the phone is lying to me) that information isn't available to advertisers.
Someone in another thread said that the location system doesn't really use GPS. That's not quite true. The cellphone "Assisted GPS" service does use the GPS satellite system, but doesn't need a full GPS receiver in the phone itself. It also uses data from the tower. The IEEE magazine "Computer" had a good summary of the technology. A PDF of the article is at http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~postPC/docs/Geolocation_ assistedGPS.pdf
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Whats a good material to block cellular/gps signals? I think that making cellphone holders that can block the signals would be a great product to sell....
It seems like it would be pretty easy to jam the GPS signal with a little gadget that sat right next to the phone. This only solves half the problem. You could still be tracked by the towers, but might sell well to the paranoid crowd. Open source hardware anyone? uPower 1575.42 transmitter
If only. Listen, some people have creepily possessive boyfriends and/or girlfriends. Some people have invasive bosses or paranoid spouses. Some people just want to make phonecalls and would otherwise prefer to just be left the hell alone.
This "nothing to hide" thing is very damn tiring, too. Wait until the next terrorist attack, when suddenly cell phone location information becomes mandatory and perhaps more accurate via differential GPS or what have you.
Now you have a system that monitors everywhere you are every moment of the day (that you are with your cell phone). I'm sure the government would never be motivated to purchase this kind of information (as the FBI, etc. already buy databases that they aren't allowed to collect themselves from various companies), and that there would never be abuse or misuse. To me, this system is the very definition of a modern panopticon.
We already live in a world of near-constant scrutiny via cameras, and yet everyone seems comfortable in their fishbowls. It's frightening.
Perhaps it is now. But you know sooner or later (sooner, I'm guessing) it will be turned into another tool for investigation. They'll simply find out every person X who's been near location Y where something interesting has occured, then probe into their lives for behavior that they find suspicious (via information purchased from companies, above), and then hassle the shit out of those they find interesting, occasionally making a spectacular enough bust to quiet the fears of the bovine populance as they live under the all-seeing eye of the tyrannical Computer.
'Moo,' they'll say as they trundle off to McDonald's(tm) for a supersize fry in their Ford Excursions, 'boy it sure is good that they caught that guy stealing change from the Coke(tm) machine.' Because of course, the level of crime necessary to trigger the use of the system is lowered and lowered as people become more and more desensitized. And the radius of your life where you're allowed to make decisions is shrinking, shrinking, gone. Who will chance anything, will live the uncircumscribed life, when that will risk the Law's piercing gaze? Only the insane, as they will be classified, the suspicious. And *those* poor fools will never be allowed a security clearance or a position of prominence. What are they hiding, that they won't keep their Big Brother wrist watch on all the time? I say bring them in for questioning every couple of weeks, right? Maybe keep them under watch (har! punny!). You see, the absence of this tool will become sufficient for suspicion in a cruel, yet ironic twist of fate.
I'll trade safety for privacy any damn day of the week. I'll trade that off-chance of laying in a ditch somewhere unable to activate my emergency location system to the constant gaze of the Machine. It's like some LOTR where everyone *wants* Sauron's eye to always be on them, a warm, comforting presence in a hard land. All of them: pussies.
Thus endeth the rant.