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."

Comments

Nope. All mobile phones.

[Anonymous Coward]

They can triangulate you without gps.

Re:Nope. All mobile phones.

[MagusSlurpy]

Yeah, I regularly see a five-mile variance on location with mine when I do anything without GPS turned on (which is any time I am not actively using a navigation app).

And since I live three miles from the Ohio River and my work on the other side of the state line, it often doesn't even know if I'm at work or at home. Which is extra funny, since I don't get a signal inside the plant.

Nope

[FranTaylor]

Honestly you really think they aren't putting tracking devices in disposable phones? Wake up and smell the espionage

Re:Nope

[drinkypoo]

Honestly you really think they aren't putting tracking devices in disposable phones?

No, I don't think they're putting tracking device in disposable phones, but using DTOA from a single sectored antenna is enough to place your location in a pretty narrow arc, and with two antennae you can be located within 30 feet or closer even in very crappy conditions. The phone plus the network is a tracking system whether there's any tracking-specific hardware in the phone.

However, super-crap phones like the LG I got from tracfone don't have a camera, magnetic sensor, or a lot of other things, so the only things they can do are track my location and maybe listen in on me whether I'm using the phone or not. That's offensive enough, but it doesn't leak as much information as a cleverer phone could.

Re:Nope

[Phrogman]

And then the purchases you make with your credit card can be matched to your cellphone location, and the stores you purchase things in, along with what you purchase can be used to build up a profile of the things you like and do etc etc. Individually each thing means nothing but collectively they add up, geolocation is an important factor in that data. Once a company has your data they can sell it - oh they might say they are going to preserve your privacy but nothing prevents them from doing so other than laws which may or may not be enforced.
Trackers is a good name. Making phone calls is about 10% of what my smartphone is capable of doing at most I am sure.

Re:Nope

[History's Coming To]

Nope. The very fact that you've made the call will give a rough geolocation, typically within 20m or so in a city. Other calls can be similarly located, also texts and any other time the phone pings the base stations. Your daily route can be tracked and analysed from day to day. That's just with a basic phone. Connect to the internet and install a Facebook app, well, say goodbye to your privacy in theory.

Re:Nope

[symbolset]

You don't have to make a call to be triangulated. That bars signal level indicator, what is it doing? It's pinging every tower in range.

Re:Nope

[CheshireDragon]

20m IS optimistic. Maybe the neighborhood you are in, but not down to 20m.

symbolset: it's RSSI(Received Signal Strength Indicator) :)

Re:Nope

[postbigbang]

It depends on the density of cell towers and your relationship to them, but 20m in urban areas is not unreasonable. If a phone has gps on, you're screwed: you can be placed in a chair.

Or at least your phone, anyway. Reasonable inferences can be made with a lot of accuracy.

If you don't want to be tracked with your phone, turn it off and remove its battery. If you want to be tracked really well, any recent Samsung phone with GPS turned on can be very highly geolocated. This isn't to do a put-down on Samsung phones, but they're quite consistent in their firmware implementations.

Re:Nope

[History's Coming To]

You've clearly never been stalked by an ex.

The big point here isn't what can be done, but what is done. All of this technology exists, and can be very useful in, for example, locating missing people. It could also be used to track people at protests to identify ringleaders. The technology is already here, we can't close the box, the important thing is whether suitable laws are in place to prevent misuse.

Re:Nope

[SternisheFan]

What exactly are you doing that you're so worried about people knowing your location?

I don't really care if people know where I am. What I care about is if they try to contact me or interfere with my movements. Simply having knowledge of my location doesn't really amount to much.

Why should you be worrie about people knowing your location? Ask the kid in Long Island, NY, who, after leaving a party one night, was 'tracked' by thugs who used easily purchased 'tracking apps'. He was shot and killed on a highway miles away from that party. All those thugs had to do to track him was to enter his phone into a $30 app. Oh, you can ask that kid, but he can't answer you, because he's DEAD. Dead because he somehow pissed off some thug with an app and a gun somehow. What if one day that kid is you, will 'ease of tracking' still be a non-issue for you?

Re:Nope

[jpapon]

The technology is already here, we can't close the box, the important thing is whether suitable laws are in place to prevent misuse.

I agree. I also find it amusing how so many people on /. scream "information wants to be free" when talking about recordings of music made by someone, but when it comes to THEIR information, they are all up in arms about how evil corporations are for sharing their information with other corporations.

Re:Nope

[jpapon]

You are my sworn enemy. Not only do I have to worry about the corporations, I have to worry about their apologists and enablers.

I'm not your enemy here, buddy. I'm just trying to have a discussion.

Freedom to share music with our friends is very different than freedom to share their personal information.

Is it? An artist is selling you some information (a recording of them performing), while specifically telling you that you cannot distribute it without their permission. How is that any different from you giving your personal information to a company, and telling them they cannot distribute it without your permission? I'm not arguing that companies should be able to distribute your information without your consent... I'm simply questioning whether it is reasonable to restrict distribution of one type of information while simultaneously fighting to completely remove restrictions from another kind. Most, if not all, of the arguments used to promote the free distribution of music could be used by companies to promote the distribution of information they have gathered from usage statistics.

All the information that is in society's best interest to flow freely or more freely (scientific publications and creative works as long as we don't destroy the industries behind them) are restricted, while that which ought to be very private (all our private digital lives, search histories, emails, phone calls, texts, GPS coordinates, social connections) are being over-shared.

I agree that the former (science, creative works) should be distributed freely, but I question your logic in saying that distribution of the latter (search histories, social connections, etc...) necessarily has a negative effect on society.

If free distribution of creative works and science has a positive effect on society, can you definitively say that free distribution of social data won't also have a positive effect? Couldn't social connection data be used to prevent the spread of disease, or study social phenomena that give us insight into the human social organism? Couldn't purchasing data be used to better allocate scarce resources? Couldn't location data be used to improve public transportation and reduce congestion on roadways?

The truth is that most people aren't comfortable with sharing all of their information, even if doing so would have a positive impact on society. Just as an artist, developer, or scientist may not be comfortable with freely sharing their work, even if doing so would have a positive impact on society.

Glacially slow news day?

[siddesu]

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.

Re:Only smart phones?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been mandated by the FCC since 2001 that every cell phone has to be tracked.

Nope!

[Greyfox]

The cellular network has to know where you are to route calls to you. Back when they first came out, someone published an article about using cellular information to locate a person with his cell phone to within 36 feet. There is a wealth of information that can be found out about you using your cell phone even if it's a 10 year old completely dumb phone (My parents are still using one of my hand-me-downs from the '90s!)

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.

Re:Nope!

[Sipper]

The cellular network has to know where you are to route calls to you. Back when they first came out, someone published an article about using cellular information to locate a person with his cell phone to within 36 feet.

Yes... additionally, last I recall this information is saved for a period of 7 years, which means not only does the phone system know where you are now, but it also knows where you've been. This means that you can be profiled based on the places you go, and thus there's a chance someone can predict where you're going to be at any given time.

Re:Nope!

[girlintraining]

The cellular network has to know where you are to route calls to you.

Not anymore than it's necessary to know where your TV station's broadcast tower is to receive programming content. It has to know which cell tower(s) your phone can communicate with. Pinpointing someone's location to within a few feet or meters is not necessary to perform the primary function of the phone; Locating a handset to within a narrow geographic footprint is an ancilliary function, and there is no reason for a carrier to maintain logs on a handset's location, travel speed, elevation, etc., except when playing a call to emergency services, in which case that information would only need to be available during the call, and perhaps for a limited time after to assist law enforcement in responding to the call out.

If laws were passed banning the use of such information for any purposes other than network diagnostics (knowing that a lot of calls get dropped along a certain street, etc.), or for law enforcement, there would be no discernable degregation in service for the average cell phone user.

Re:Nope!

[ColdWetDog]

It knows when you are sleeping,
It knows when you're awake,
It knows if you've been bad or good,
so be good for goodness sake!

I always thought that jingle was pretty creepy.

Re:Nope!

[MagusSlurpy]

It worked great. They found him with a conventional wiretap.

Re:Nope!

[Dan541]

It knows when you are sleeping,
It knows when you're awake,
It knows if you've been bad or good,
so be good for goodness sake!

Next Christmas I'm going to hang signs like that underneath the CCTV cameras in London.

Re:Only smart phones?

[zAPPzAPP]

The most basic tracking function is achieved by monitoring the RSSI and cell ID of surrounding signal masts. Possible on any phone.
Uploading this data can be done over GSM or even SMS, which any old phone can do too. They too have some personal information about you to link with this, but of course not as much as smartphones.

People often forget that the phone is an autonomous device that can do things on it's own and without showing any of that activity on it's UI side. They only see it do things when they push buttons, so they assume that pushing buttons is a required part for the phone to be able to do things.

Exocortex

[VoidEngineer]

Can anyone say 'exocortex'? The only thing missing are the right apps and software stack.

accelerando
http://manybooks.net/titles/strosscother05accelerando-txt.html

Re:Only smart phones?

[cpu6502]

Supposedly for 911 locating, but I suspect a secondary reason is for 9/11-related locating.

Re:Just say No

[BitterOak]

There is a simple solution. Don't have a cell phone.

That's not as easy as it used to be. 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. So, what happens when you have an emergency or your car breaks down and you need to call AAA? With the demise of pay phones, cell phones are no longer a luxury, they are a necessity.

Re:Problem and solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Letting the FCC boff itself just means that companies will use spectrum for their things, so a cheap baby monitor would stomp on a large amount of bandwidth, or someone's rear view camera on their RV will cause any BlueTooth or Wi-Fi system to be unusable.

turn off the phone when not in use

[alen]

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

Re:turn off the phone when not in use

[nurb432]

Turning off may not be enough. Pulling the battery, would be. Or a 'Faraday' bag in your car to drop it in

Re:turn off the phone when not in use

[w_dragon]

I suspect off is enough, even airplane mode should be enough. If any common cell phones kept broadcasting anything when turned off I suspect the FAA and FDA (some medical equipment is radio-sensitive) would be aware, and probably not amused.

Re:turn off the phone when not in use

[nurb432]

On my apple ( which no longer has a sim card ) turning on flight mode only disabled the cell radio, and wifi still runs.

Re:turn off the phone when not in use

[Hartree]

They can call you just fine.

They'll get forwarded to voice mail.

I consider this a feature, not a problem.

Re:turn off the phone when not in use

[0123456]

And how are people supposed to call me then?

Why do you want random people to call you at random times?

My cell phone is off unless I'm on call, need to make a call or expect someone to need to call me. Otherwise I rather like not having everyone on the planet think they can waste my time at any moment by dialling a number.

I wouldn't even have the phone if the company didn't provide it for free.

Re:turn off the phone when not in use

[Eightbitgnosis]

I have this thing called friends and family. They call me, and sometimes we hangout.

off the mark

[PopeRatzo]

An article in the NY Times argues that the devices we call 'cell phones' should instead be called 'trackers.'

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.

Re:Good metaphor

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take the 4chan one please.

How to commit the perfect crime

[Snotnose]

1. Leave cellphone on coffee table
2. ???
3. ???
4. Profit!

Re:The point of this article

[fnj]

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.

Re:Only smart phones?

[PAjamian]

More and more cellphones today have batteries that cannot be removed by the consumer, though.

E911

[khipu]

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

not pinging

[dutchwhizzman]

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.

Re:not pinging

[StripedCow]

What they can't check: if it is you who is carrying the phone.

Therefore, I suggest to regularly swap phones with random people on the street/in the subway/etc.

Re:Good metaphor

[Volguus Zildrohar]

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.