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Sensor Characteristics Uniquely Identify Individual Phones
An anonymous reader writes "SFGate reports that Stanford researchers have figured out a way to generate a unique fingerprint from a cell phone's suite of built-in sensors. The tiny accelerometers, gyroscopes, microphones, and speakers in cell phones have characteristics that vary slightly from handset to handset, and these variations may contain enough information to uniquely identify a given handset. How that information might get from the phone to a third party varies (the article describes a JavaScript snippet reading the Z-axis accelerometer, though it says little about how the user might block such information from being read), but the possibility for abuse is certainly troubling."
Cell phones have been identifiable by RF fingerprinting for many, many years.
Was a common anti-fraud technique in the analog cellular days.
A statistical analysis of your online writing-style identifies you. CCTV cameras identify you from your gait (the "way you walk"). And now your smartphone sensors give away what smartphone you are using (... useful to "backdoor" the device, I presume?). My question to these scientist: Why do you create this tech? Do you not care about the privacy of the common man, or indeed the technological future your children will be forced to live in? My 2 Cents on this, and similar efforts to "ID people"....
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I was of the impression that anything that accesses the cell network already has a unique IMEI adddress and that devices that access networks have a unique MAC address. What does this provide that they don't? It would seem this information could be spoofed at least as easily as such hardware addresses.
IAMA scientist who creates such things. So here's my answer to your question: we create this kind of tech to allow law enforcement to identify individuals (in a very broad sense of all these terms), so we can lock them in (this is supposed to be very unsurprising).
If the tech in question is "fingerprint" (real ones, with your fingers), law enforcement is "police" (and not military/counter-terrorism/political) and individual is "criminal", I think pretty much everybody agrees that it is a good thing (you might be tempted to say otherwise, but imagine we're talking about someone you know/love having been assaulted/killed).
Crime happens where people are (e.g. homes, train stations, internet), and criminals use the same tools as we all do (e.g. screwdrivers, cutters, smartphones, etc.). If criminals move, law enforcement must be able to follow them (that's why police officers have powerful cars that exceed speed limits, btw). If the criminals start using smartphones, law enforcement starts using smartphones as a mean to identify/follow/[...] them. Or let them go - but this is something you'll have to explain to your children when they get robbed (or worse).
So, there is nothing new in creating new identification means - it has always happened, and will always do.
Now, the real concern is the way this kind of technology can be misused and abused (e.g. by governments or secret agencies). The question is not new at all, and people from all generations have had to take a stance on this - most of the times, in a democratic, free country, by going for a middle-ground approach (e.g. we collect the DNA of offenders, but are not allowed to keep them more than X years, and an independent supervisor makes sure the data does not leak, etc.)
Paranoid Americans is a GOOD thing! A few more people are actually waking up to the $hit that is happening.