Slashdot Mirror
Cell Phones: Tracking Devices That Happen To Make Calls
An anonymous reader writes "An article in the NY Times argues that the devices we call 'cell phones' should instead be called 'trackers.' It would help remind the average user that whole industries have sprung up around the mining and selling of their personal data — not to mention the huge amount of data requested by governments. Law professor Eben Moglen goes a step further, saying our cell phones are effectively robots that use us for mobility. 'They see everything, they're aware of our position, our relationship to other human beings and other robots, they mediate an information stream around us.' It's interesting to see such a mainstream publication focus on privacy like this; the authors say that since an objects name influences how people think about the object, renaming 'cell phones' could be an simple way to raise privacy awareness."
I assume this only applies to smart phones where people have paid extra for enhanced tracking "features".
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
They're out there, maaaaan!
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
They can triangulate you without gps.
Honestly you really think they aren't putting tracking devices in disposable phones? Wake up and smell the espionage
I thought that stopped to be news after the first 20 or so TV mysteries where the police requested the phone details of the murder suspect, so it MUST have been around the first half of the 80s.
am I the only one reminded of Dr Theopolis & Twiki from the campy 70s series?
Morale of this story is when you go off to murder that guy, leave your cell phone at home (Or stick it in the wife's glove box!) Bin Laden's courier would take the battery out of his until he was in the next town over.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Problem: Private corporations selling our private data in order to sell us more useless shit, tracking our every move, and engaging in behavior that, if it were done in real life, would have them serving 380 million consecutive sentences for stalking.
Solution: Make it illegal, or begin carpet bombing the offending corporations... and out of the ashes will rise a new government-controlled cellular network. It'll probably cost more, do less, and it'll still track everything you do... but at least they won't try to sell you 2 for 1 deals on toilet paper.
... Or, you know, we could just tell the FCC to fuck itself and build our own networks ala pirate radio... The airwaves are, afterall, a shared public resource. If it's being mismanaged, take it back. -- Abraham Lincoln.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Can anyone say 'exocortex'? The only thing missing are the right apps and software stack.
accelerando
http://manybooks.net/titles/strosscother05accelerando-txt.html
All that will happen if you call them trackers is that the 'public' will quickly come to accept the idea that they are tracking devices!
Thanks to "Find My Friends" I was able to track my parents when they recently visited. I could see where they were driving, and if it looked like they were headed in the wrong direction, I could give them directions to get back on the right roads.
Phones are like a symbiotic robotic lifeform.
They need us to move around, to live, to feed off information in to the hivemind brain.
We need them for their extra-sensory perception, for our turbo-charged "memory" and compact library (the internet) and communicating over distances impossible by almost every animal alive now, I think. (Whales can communicate stupid distances, and other large sealife, I am sure)
I don't get the paranoia, here.
Would you like to live in a world where everybody knew everything about you, including your habit of picking your nose by curving your hand up in to a claw, or your current vitals as you fainted at the cafe and the ambulance already being on the way to help you and arriving literally a few seconds after it?
Or do you want to live in a world where nobody communicated face to face, where everything was anonymous. Basically 4chan as a reality.
Phones are an acceptable privacy breach.
Unless you are some sort of triple terrorist pedo human trafficker drug dealer murderer person, you are fine.
Your worth to an advertiser is only for money.
If you don't want to be stalked by society, go live in the woods already. Go take over a bit of Africa with all your wealth of knowledge and resources and build a super society and make it better than everywhere else. No? Then quit your bitching.
MoBot. ie Mobile Robot.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Looks like RMS was right all along.
There is a simple solution. Don't have a cell phone.
i know someone who used to do that when he had his first cell phone years ago. no law says it has to stay on all the time
That's what I call my phone.
And have done so for the last 10 years or so.
GTD - noun
â"abbreviation for
1. Government Tracking Device
Example Usage:
Oh, excuse me, I've got a call on my GTD.
I hope you didn't bring your GTD, that'll ruin all of the fun.
The government caught Abimail Guzman by tracking him on his GTD.
The bit where the outage in the UK cell network caused electronic ankle monitors to fail really gives you some thought...
The "making calls" stuff is really only an extra feature, and the only reason it's included is in order to listen in.
the chilliest passage:
creepy!
but it is true. as time evolves, and these ever present ever necessary devices invade more of our social and cognitive existence, we're basically talking about the fact that we are going to be following instructions from these things
and we can't separate ourselves: all of the positive feedbacks of gaming: endorphins, our entire social existence mediated through them... we are becoming cyborg worker ants controlled by cellphones... for what purpose? is anyone in control?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
if we have a device that knows all of our routines, all of our friends, all of our habits, etc., and this predictability can be fed into algorithms to engage us to foster "positive" behavior according to some external agenda, then if we were to engage in new activity, or new social contacts, or go to new places.. then the device we are basically addicted to could discourage us: load our favorite games slower, prevent us from contacting people we really want to talk to, change even our cognition with the types of news stories and ads we see...
i'm not a paranoid schizophrenic, but we are talking about an amazing fantastic control device for locking our behavior into that of perfect little worker bees. maybe not even in overt ways, ie, somebody with an agenda: i'm talking in subtle, unpurposeful ways only visible by analyzing the overall effects of overlapping algorithms
super creepy dystopian thoughts here
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Is to remind people that we're ALL Boiled Frogs.
There's MAny (many many) quotes about the slow erosion of freedoms but the following is one of my favorites.
First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I'm pretty sure they knew where you were when you were making call with your land line, too. Heck, even when you weren't making a call, they knew where your phone was. Apparently the conspiracy goes waaaaaay back.
I think it would be more appropriate that police and corporate trackers should instead be called "domestic spies".
Phones don't track you, people who want to know what you're doing track you. They're the ones that should be called "privacy violating domestic terrorists and trackers".
I'm sorry, but if someone is tracking you without your expressed, overt permission, they are terrorists.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What about smartphones on which you can switch the GPS receiver off? I don't know if this is possible on iOS (wouldn't surprise me if it's not), but my Android phone can switch it off at my discretion.
Or is this a placebo button?
Granted, they can still triangulate your position with the towers, but only within the sphere of the towers. GPS on the other hand can pretty much narrow that down to within 1 acre or less.
it can be a trap. they can purposely install spyware on the phone, watch who you call, text, where you are, and download ur nude pics
...that you can fully configure... ...don't ever buy it!
If you can't replace the bootloader, kernel, OS... ...don't ever buy it.
If there are no Linux drivers... ...don't ever buy it.
That's why I'll be waiting for what that team of ex-Nokia people will come up with.
1. Leave cellphone on coffee table
2. ???
3. ???
4. Profit!
RMS wrote an article calling them Stalin Trackers. Pretty sure most of us laughed at him. Not that the NY Times necessarily gives an idea credibility any more.
But you can carry an old model, the kind you can turn fully off and even remove the battery, and keep it turned off except if you have to make a call to AAA, the police, or the paramedics. Call friends when you are at home or someplace you don't care if anybody knows you're there.
I understand what they are and that they exist but I thought that "burner" was just TV-cop jargon. Still, as long as the article mentions them, which are best? What's the best way to get one? Assume a maximally-paranoid consumer.
No, "enhanced 911" (i.e., the ability of authorities to determine your location) needs to meet these requirements:
95% of a network operator's in-service phones must be E911 compliant ("location capable") by December 31, 2005. (Several carriers missed this deadline, and were fined by the FCC.)
Wireless network operators must provide the latitude and longitude of callers within 300 meters, within six minutes of a request by a PSAP. Accuracy rates must meet FCC standards on average within any given participating PSAP service area by September 11, 2012 (deferred from September 11, 2008).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1
It's just measuring their signal strength. The pinging happens if the phone wants to change to a different base station, or if it wants to inform the base station it's currently connected to it's still alive. Not that it matters a lot, since they will have a rough log of where you've been for months/years after the fact, depending on how long your cell phone company is required to keep the records. The roughness is because they'll only have the base station you're logged onto and no triangulation, plus the fact that there are multiple minutes in between the time stamps, especially if you're not moving a lot. Once the police has a warrant, the cell phone towers will start pinging you and triangulation will take place with a frequency that can easily be once a minute. Depending on cell density, they might be able to locate you almost as precise as with a GPS.
With a smart phone, it's a different story. If you have apps that call home regularly to check for messages, you'll typically be exchanging data with base stations much more often. If you have GPS enabled (battery hog, so unlikely for a lot of users) and an app that stores your data (like google on android does themselves), it's dead easy to track you. The alternative, wifi base stations that get logged by google for every android phone unless switched off, is much more common since most people leave wifi on on their phone. Not so accurate as GPS, but within cities, usually sufficient.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
We could call cell phones "globals". Say, I hear I'll be able to get a CVI from Google soon! I wonder what "motivational imperative" it will come with?
Please continue to tailor the world to my interests, make products I enjoy, and use the data you collect about me to show me things I may enjoy owning/partaking of in the future.
Sincerely,
Someone who isn't insane and paranoid.
P.S. Bring back Firefly, you guys really missed the mark there. Come on.
- Android phone with Tasker. ... miss a few important contracts :/
- Set Tasker to toggle on & offline flight mode in intervals - more online time for quicker response to messages, more offline time for more privacy
- use Replicant as your ROM distro or Cyanogen if that's not an option. Bear in mind Replicant isn't fully secure due to the binary modem blob but afaik it's the best we have (other than Symbian?)
- collect your SMS and voicemails when you feel like it
A blog I run for the wealth
I like the idea. You all can reach me at my tracker if you need to speak.
The purpose of the tracking is so the jews can suck as many shekels as possible from you. The shekel stream is enormous The biggest jews are your jewphone provider. Then there are other jews chipping away at you, the Jewpple Jewphone being notorious for jewing huge amounts of shekels out of you.
BEWARE JEWPPLE AND JEWOOGLE
I see your point. It's a terrible starting point and the trust of the company is broken anyway so why give them the business.
However, that viewpoint is directly against Replicant just a little too quickly:
http://replicant.us/faq/
You're also going against the companies out there advising and customising phones including Android for corporations.
I was thinking of going back to Symbian. I had a E55 and E71 before this Galaxy and prefered the battery and maps coverage but is that any better? What phone do you use?
Other best plan I have is carrying 2 phones; an old phone for phone operations and then something bigger but somehow definitely offline somehow, that can be made online quickly if I need it (quicker than a battery pull). I think breaking the usefulness into separate devices is another strategy. How's about putting the darn things in a metal box?
Another strategy I can think of is to act like a businessman with corporate secrets to protect and go with whatever they use. Can you comment on Blackberry?
I don't know why I take such an interest in privacy, it's thankfully feels like an intellectual exercise. But by doing it we learn things that are useful in less paranoid situations. For example, saving battery when there's no source of power for days... or when innocent but on the run.
A blog I run for the wealth
"....could be an simple way to raise privacy awareness." Ever heard of A,E,I,O,U and sometimes Y??? Idiot. It should be "...could be a simple way to raise privacy awareness." You're probably an American...the product of such an awesome education system. Way to show off your ignorance.
Not anymore than it's necessary to know where your TV station's broadcast tower is to receive programming content.
I thought a parabolic antenna had to be pointed at the broadcast tower when the broadcast tower is far away, especially when it is tens of thousands of miles away in geostationary orbit. Likewise, cellular providers use directional antennas on their towers to make cells smaller so that they can add more subscribers on each tower.
When's the last time you saw a phone booth or a pay phone? There are a couple left in the city where I live, but not many.
pubwvj wrote:
We still have pay phones around here.
Around where? There may be enough pay phones where you live, but apparently this is not the case where BitterOak lives. Or are you recommending that people where BitterOak lives move to where you live?
Then arrange these hangouts a week in advance through voice mail. They call your voice mail and offer a play date, and then you call their voice mail and accept, reject, or counter-offer. Spontaneity is a luxury, not a necessity