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Indian Government To Track Locations of All Cell Phone Users
asto21 writes with this excerpt from The Indian Express: "As per amendments made to operators' licences, beginning May 31, operators would have to provide the Department of Telecommunications real-time details of users' locations in latitudes and longitudes. Documents obtained by The Indian Express show that details shall initially be provided for mobile numbers specified by the government. Within three years, service providers will have to provide information on locations of all users. The information will have some margin of error at first. But by 2013, at least 60 per cent of the calls in urban areas would have to be accurately tracked when made 100 metres away from the nearest cell tower. By 2014, the government will seek to increase the proportion to 75 per cent in cities and 50 per cent in suburban and rural areas."
No doubt this is for the good of the citizens. I hope the US follows suit soon.
/sarcasm
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Having been to India narrowing a persons location to within 100 meters still could mean thousands of people. It's like when they tracked the long island serial killer when he was calling a victim's sister from Times Square. They had little chance of picking out the guy from the hundreds of other people there.
With 1B inhabitants, that's a hell of a lot of data to store. Privacy issue aside, I really wonder if there're not drowning themselfs in data...
Seems pretty obvious to me that the biggest result will be that people who are actual criminals will take pains to either turn off their cell phones, use stolen phones or just go without any time they are doing something criminal.
Meanwhile all the regular people are now even more at risk of the government or anyone else with access to this information like ex-boyfriends at the telco using this information against them.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Really, why is it that governments feel they must track our every movement, our every interaction? The answer is that governments - no matter how well they start off - all eventually end up seeking to fully control the lives of their citizens: it seems to be some sort of unavoidable emergent property of large aggregations of people. The idea of a citizen having some degree of personal sovereignty just falls by the wayside and everybody just gets swept up in the imperatives of the government. This may seem innocuous - or even benign to the naive - but the long term result is that it is a seeking of control for the sake of having control. Being traced like this can hardly be considered to be in the best interests of individual people.
If the purpose of providing user's location in real time is strictly for saving life and health of the same user (eg. if user dialed in for emergency, or is being actively searched for as a missing person, or as a person under stress as in danger of committing suicide, or a person suffering from Alzheimer's and known to wander off, etc..) then this measure seems logical and justified. However, if the purpose of the measure is to track all the people all the time, and recording this for yet unknown reasons, than the measure is to be feared and rejected as unjustified and unproportionate. There's never a question whether or not technology helps in fighting the crime. The real question is whether society (especially democratic society) wants that kind of intrusion in lives of law obedient citizens.
For "normal" people, obviously:
There are 1,170,938,000 people in India.
The Taj attacks were carried out by 10 men.
Meaning 99.9999991% of the people to be affected by this are NOT the poster children/excuse for this kind of tracking.
It seems all the governments of the world are in a race to be the most onerous and most oppressive. They learn from each other, and so must we (normal peeps).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
What are you talking about? If you have a tuple with 8 bytes each, that is still only 24GB for just the data. In terms of storage, buy a machine with 128GB of RAM that asynchronously writes back to a RAID volume, what's the big deal? Maybe networking would be more of an issue, but that is probably very solvable too.
--"You are your own God"--
RFID implanted into the forehead that is used to verify identity for any transaction. Don't have the ID, you can't buy/sell goods once the tracking is required for every transaction.
He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” Revelation 13:16-17
---- I don't always quote the bible. But when I do, I make it about the end of the world.
"Turns out you can't shut off tracking, that phones will not work if you manage to disable GPS tracking."
And this is complete bullshit. I have a nokia from 2 years ago that I can in fact make the GPS go completely off and the phone still works.
hardware Hacking with iphones also shows that the GPS is NOT required for operation and jailbroken phone show that the GPS really is OFF when set to off, same for android phones.
You know if you want to make things up, at least do a little bit of fact checking it makes people write you off right away when they see a blatent fabrication.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You can disable GPS completely, moron. Hell my Galaxy S has GPS that doesn't even work most of the time anyway. Not to mention there are plenty of phones with no GPS at all. Don't let these facts get in the way of patting your own back though.
Not to mention he doesn't even tell us the name of this supposed law that was passed. Apparently the people making feature phones with no GPS didn't get the news about GPS being mandatory by law.
They could make an argument using the health care bill (since just about everything can be considered as pertaining to someone's "health") so that if an emergency exists they know where the individual is.
Since you brought up that much maligned health care bill in an apparent effort to slander it more, did you know (and I doubt if you did, or if you did, that you'd actually want it publicly known) that in 2014 all health plans in America will no longer be allowed to deny coverage because of a pre-existing condition? Also, the working poor (up to 133% of the poverty line; or roughly $12/hour for a full time worker who supports a family of four) will receive the same excellent Medicare that our elderly do. Similar worker who make up to 400% of that line (about $88,000) will have part of their coverage rebated by the feds based on a sliding scale to 97%.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.