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Verizon Plans Location Warning Sticker
nonprofiteer writes "After all the location tracking drama, Verizon tells Congress that 'it's going to start slapping a surgeon-general-type warning on the phones it sells: Using this device could be hazardous to your location privacy, and may result in your being tracked!' The actual warning (PDF) is a little drier — illustration with story."
There is no way this is going to put on any iPhone Verizon sells.
People are lazy and don't care, until it affects them directly.
And for the most part, it will never affect most people directly, thus they will ot care.
It's a bit like the Facebook privacy issue: If they knew, they really wouldn't care. The sad reality is that most people are of the "If you're not doing anything wrong, why do you care if the police have a CCTV in your living room?"
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Very little of it has anything to do with people being "lazy". EULAs are so long and convoluted that even most lawyer types still have no idea what they are agreeing to. The same will go for this sticker, people wont have any idea how much tracking information is being given out. Some would take "could be" meaning none, etc.
This really isn't a solution to the problem. The solution would be to come up with many regulations to slap down on companies since the competition is doing it as well.
If the option is get a phone with this warning or no phone at all, then this is not stepping up. This is then just as useless as not offering the information.
The shit we get ourselves riled up about is downright depressing.
I'll note that prior to cell phones, every time you used your phone, the telco already had location info on you - the service address!
They could not, however, tie it to you. Yes, if you used the phone at home. But what about the pay phone at the local 7-Eleven? How did the telco have location info on "you" from there?
So we assume by "phone" you mean "cell phone" which presumably connects to "cell towers". Since when is this information not already logged and gathered by the telcos running the towers? If you're worried about "location privacy", how about not carrying around a device which broadcasts a unique ID that's collected by third parties?
Yes, this is already a matter of a either a phone or complete privacy.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage