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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.
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
Probably, but you got me thinking of Wilma!
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.
MoBot. ie Mobile Robot.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
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
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.
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
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.
I'll take the 4chan one please.
1. Leave cellphone on coffee table
2. ???
3. ???
4. Profit!
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.
Yeah, I bet until they came for you, things didn't seem so bad. Crime was down, the trains ran on time, the economy was under control, banks paid interest, and you had a job.
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
And your freedom is being eroded by having the choice of carrying a cell phone... how? This must be the same sense in which you get poorer when Zuckerberg makes an extra million.
Seems to me you're driven more by FUD than actual civil liberties concerns.
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.
I am not sure why the options must be one extreme or the other. I'm sure this is a logical fallacy, but I don't know the name of it. It is possible to live in a world where people don't know *everything* there is to know about me without me also being anonymous.
I would like to live in the world of acceptable tradeoffs, please.
When confronted with one problem, some think "I'll use recursion". Now they are confronted with one problem.
It depends on how fast you raise the temperature. It's been shown (discussed/cited on /. recently), that if you raise the temperature slowly enough, the frog will indeed sit there and boil...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Well, here's the acceptable tradeoff. You have a phone, which is effectively a computer more powerful than the size-of-a-fridge-cost-more-than-a-car graphics workstations of a decade ago, and runs for two days off a battery that takes two hours to charge, and is connected to other computers by a global network. It fits in your pocket, and it fits in your life, and you can afford it because it subsidised by the information sold on to marketing companies that are trying to sell you stuff you probably don't care about.
You could pay full price, but you probably don't want to.
- 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'm sure this is a logical fallacy, but I don't know the name of it.
It's called "false dichotomy" or "false dilemma" and, more generally, "fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses."
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
how? This must be the same sense in which you get poorer when Zuckerberg makes an extra million.
I keep hearing this argument repeated from free market advocates, and it doesn't make any more sense than when I first heard it. Let me explain why.
Money is not a measure of absolute wealth. Wealth is actual, practical things which exist: food, water, housing, goods, viable ecology. We are all richer when we have these things. But a money ticker going upwards has absolutely nothing to do with wealth.
What money measures is social power: someone who has a million dollars can command the resources of other people to do things for them. This means that money is a relative measure, not an absolute measure: it exists only because other people offer to place themselves in a socially inferior position relative to the money-holder.
We know this because money is predicated on, and created as debt - nobody creates money for free, they require real goods in trade. That this is true is obvious from the panic re debt repayment in the Eurozone: bankers are starting to worry that money they created might have inadvertently been given away for free, accidentally creating rather than merely transferring money! This accident, we are told - ie, the potential that people could have been made rich without someone else becoming poor in equal measure - could endanger the entire global money system, and the system now requires harsh sacrifices - "austerity" - from those made accidentally rich. The money-creation system nearly became non-zero-sum - it must be made to balance again.
Therefore the possession of money creates a differential of power; it does not create wealth, it creates a soft form (and sometimes hard forms) of enslavement. So yes: we do all get poorer when the Zuckerbergs of this world get richer. Because that's how money is constructed.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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.
Thanks! :) One day I will go through the list and learn them properly...
When confronted with one problem, some think "I'll use recursion". Now they are confronted with one problem.
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
While I'm generally sympathetic to the view of money as "shares" in something, your particular analysis still fails. First, wealthy as Zuckerberg is, even if his money represented a share in a fixed pot, his share is still so small that it doesn't affect you in any practical way. Rich people haven't driven up the price of important scarce resources like land or resources. In fact, in all the areas in which rising prices are a problem in our society (primarily, medicine and education), the rising prices are due to artificial scarcities created by special interests. Furthermore, Zuckerberg's wealth is not part of a fixed pot; our economy is growing, which means that effectively that new stuff people want to pay money for is being created all the time.
As for the Eurozone, your analysis also doesn't work. While one may muse about the deeper meaning of the money owed in the European crisis, in the end, the losses of European banks aren't about some abstract system, they are real in the same way as if you or I lose $1000. Bizarre as moving those little numbers and pieces of paper around may seem, in the end, the numbers still have reality because that's what we still agree on. If we ever were to lose trust in those numbers, we have a name for that: inflation or hyperinflation.
No, you are not Zuckerberg's slave. You are slave to reality, however: you used to have to hunt for food, worry about starving, and hope that your social group didn't arbitrarily kick you out. Money has greatly reduced those constraints to the point where you enjoy a lot more individual liberties than people used to. The system may seem arbitrary, capricious, and oppressive, but it is still a lot less so than what it replaced. And until someone comes up with a better system, that's what we're going to stick with.