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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.'"
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
If you have secrets, ANY secrets, especially BUSINESS secrets, under NO circumstances mention anything over the telephone!
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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."
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.