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Privacy, Mobile Phones, and Ubiquitous Data Collection
ChelleChelle writes "Participatory sensing technologies are greatly expanding the possible uses of mobile phones in ways that could improve our lives and our communities (for example, by helping us to understand our exposure to air pollution or our daily carbon footprint). However, with these potential gains comes great risk, particularly to our privacy. With their built-in microphones, cameras and location awareness, mobile phones could, at the extreme, become the most widespread embedded surveillance tools in history. Whether phones engaged in sensing data are tools for self and community research, coercion or surveillance depends on who collects the data, how it is handled, and what privacy protections users are given. This article gives a number of opinions about what programmers might do to make this sort of data collection work without slipping into surveillance and control."
batman, anyone?
weinersmith
While lawyers and social scientists work on structural changes to help ensure privacy in participatory sensing, many of the initial and critically important steps toward privacy protection will be up to application developers. By innovating to put participants first, we can create systems that respect individuals' needs to control sensitive data. We can also augment people's ability to make sense of such granular data, and engage participants in making decisions about that data over the long term. Through attention to such principles, developers will help to ensure that 4 billion little brothers are not watching us. Instead, participatory sensing can have a future of secure, willing, and engaged participation.
Since when is it up to the application developer to determine what they're going to develop?
This popped up a couple years ago when they started turning anyone's cell phones into a wireless microphone (even when off). Ever since then I have had zero expectations of privacy with a cell phone around. I don't assume they are doing it (or anyone is) but the possibility is there. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1029_3-6140191.html
Time to create a company that sells lead enclosures for cell phones!
Yes, but I have control over the source.
I can turn my phone (or the aspects of it in question) off.
At some point the tin foil hats have to come off.
Me, I could care less if someone is tracking where I am or what I am doing. What difference does it make?
If you use a phone or a computer you are susceptible to the same"invasion". I am not going to stop using my computers or my phones.
I think the real solution to this is royalties. Every single time anyone in government or as a private interest accesses your information, you get paid a dollar (and that doubles every decade). If they profit in any way from accessing your information, you must be given half the profits. This would mean, of course, a record of every time your personal data is accessed, and that wouldn't be a bad thing either.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
We need an Open Source mobile phone - not just a Nokia running Maemo or a Neo1973 but one that was built and designed from the ground up to be open source. Have the firmware for the baseband & the OS all readily available and modifiable and use only off the shelf commodity components, no questionable 'black box' transceiver IC's. I am no overzealous RMS fanboi but I know this is the only way to be sure
I am sick of seeing stories on here about how De Police may or may not be able to activate the Mic on your phone and spy on you but nobody really has any idea how - trojans were mentioned, as well as people claiming this is some obscure part of the GSM standard.
Of course as soon as you transmit something using radio waves the source can be tracked, you can mess around with timing advances to let on you are further away but if you got a van with an antenna after you it won't help you much
Is still around, even encrypted -- if you feel the need.
Sort of like the last Batman movie?
Computer Science is all about trying to find the right wrench to bang in the right screw. -T.Cumbo?
Simple solution: don't use a mobile phone. I haven't owned one for years and to be honest I wouldn't use/carry one if you paid me - not being forever tethered to a communications network and always available to whoever might want to call (or feeling guilty for not taking calls if the phone is turned off) is a truly amazing and freeing experience.
I read an article about Google starting to use the location data from Google Maps to analyze traffic patterns to determine where traffic was backed up, etc.
Randomly-found article using, what else?, google: http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/google-uses-your-mobile-to-end-traffic-jams-629554
Anyway, just another example where we know the data is being collected, but somehow it feels less comfortable when the data gets used.
Won't stop me from using it if I get to a city where there might be enough cars to actually use the data.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
where batman jacks into all the cell phones in the city and can 'see' everything that is happening. Ooohhhh, how awesomely stupid is that. It sounds like an idea a 5 year old would invent, a bit like batman.
Anyone with a radioshack scanner could listen in on anyones cell phone calls. I remember doing this, and actually found it quite boring. Listening in on peoples phone conversations is like reading random peoples twitters. Who cares when some random guy gets home and wonders whats for dinner, or when you are supposed to pick up your kids from some function? Certainly doesn't worry me any.
for all the concerns about privacy, our lives are getting more public every day. man is a social animal after all. It is surprising how people don't mind exposing their private preferences, photos, friends etc. on Facebook or MySpace and yet are concerned when this very data is used with profit motives. In the end of the day, perfect privacy and security means getting off the grid. As mobile malware becomes more prevalent mobile technology can be misused in diabolical ways as was recently demonstrated in the Blackhat conference
Me, I could care less if someone is tracking where I am or what I am doing. What difference does it make?
Well I guess you haven't read One Nation Under Surveilance yet.
Huh? What's that supposed to mean? And why the hell is this modded "Insightful"?
When everyone has a camera, you tend to end up in photos you didn't intend to be in - sometimes without even noticing.
More phones have GPSes now, and may be able to automatically geotag their photos.
There are providers that offer online photo storage plans right off the phone.
So with those in mind, all it would take is one warrant to search a mobile photo host and run face recognition software, and you have an easily compiled database of who was where and when, and with enough data, the ability to plot your daily habits and location trends, who you know, who they know, areas you and your friends tend to frequent, and by extension what your interests and motives may be, etc.
It's not really a panic about what could happen if we let this get out of hand, as much as it is an observation of what could be done cheaply with practically off the shelf software on a common PC today.
... sleep under a bridge tomorrow.
That Scott McNealy (RIP, Sun Microsystems) hasn't already said?:
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538
they have all their meetings naked in a hot 100f sauna where mobiles die.
oh and its hard to stick one up ur ass.
anyway you can make your own opensource phone, just get a 30 dollar mobile module board,
build your own mini linux/arm controller board, and use an existing older crappy phone for a case/lcd module.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Actually ease of use trumps all other explanations of the great corporate snatch of privacy. From routers with default passwords or no encryption (in order to make it 'easy to set up') to crazy file sharing schemes, it's the users who accept the default, open-plan sharing solutions.
This guy got more than he bargined for with Ovi: http://captainstupid.wordpress.com/
Although he freely admits he's an idiot.
Reminds me of a short story I read a while back. Something like "Osama, Phone Home". Batman did a very poor ripoff of it.
Of course you are absolutely right. But do consider the whole thread here. A boss who orders you to add spyware to the application you work on is most likely not the kind of boss who will take no for an answer.
E.g.
A housing developer builds houses, but rarely actually does the bricklaying himself, he gets a bricklayer to do that.
it's exactly the same for applications; programmers are the equivalent of bricklayers.
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