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Mobile Phone Companies Appear To Be Selling Your Location To Almost Anyone (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: You may remember that last year, Verizon (which owns Oath, which owns TechCrunch) was punished by the FCC for injecting information into its subscribers' traffic that allowed them to be tracked without their consent. That practice appears to be alive and well despite being disallowed in a ruling last March: companies appear to be able to request your number, location, and other details from your mobile provider quite easily. The possibility was discovered by Philip Neustrom, co-founder of Shotwell Labs, who documented it in a blog post earlier this week. He found a pair of websites which, if visited from a mobile data connection, report back in no time with numerous details: full name, billing zip code, current location (as inferred from cell tower data), and more. (Others found the same thing with slightly different results depending on carrier, but the demo sites were taken down before I could try it myself.)
We ARE the product, and short of bloody revolution there's SFA we can do about it. Time to open that Facebook account I guess - the war has been lost, so I may as well get as much value as I can out of our corporate overlords in return for them raping my privacy.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Problem is, I don't know what of my currently innocent doings will be considered nefarious in a decade, and neither does anybody else.
But the information will still be out there.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Everything which is not forbidden is compulsory.
If a company isn't forbidden from selling it to make money they will find a way to do so.
Don't use Facebook... or any social networking site. If you're going to post on a site like Slashdot, consistently fake a few personal details and simply never share others.
Don't use GMail, Hotmail, or any other such system. (I run my own mail server, which is probably not reasonable for most people... but there's also probably a market out there for a small appliance with a domain registration + DNS package that gives you your mail server without too much user effort).
I have friends 'IRL', which is where they belong. If I only ever catch up with you by reading your Facebook page... we're not friends anymore anyway.
You're still going to leave a trail through your credit or debit card, plus whatever government database you're in that is shared in any way, but you can significantly limit the data gathered on you.
Unfortunately, that's less true every day. Every photo you're in is subject to facial recognition and even if it's not location tagged... location recognition probably isn't far behind (I don't like being photographed and every year I let my kids' school know they're not authorized to publish their names or pictures except in the hardcopy yearbooks). Every text post you're mentioned in can be used to build a shadow profile of you. Other people are giving up your personal information for you whether you want them to or not. And, of course... your phone company is pimping you out to data miners like you're a $2 alley-dwelling crack whore.
Does the phone come with its own cell phone towers?
Nope. How would a VPN help? A mobile phone is a location tracking device. It is part of the network design and wouldn't work without it.
I miss a great deal from family members and old friends from school because I refuse to touch facebook. I've stuck with my decision, and certainly won't change it now, but say there is no cost is wrong.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
Exactly. People are missing the entire point.
The difference is it's easy to not use Facebook
Just because you've never signed up for FB does not mean they're not tracking you. You're a FB user the same way you're an Equifax customer.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.