Why would you allow a mobile phone with its spark hazard any where near an oil refinery.
Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
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Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#12Why would you allow a mobile phone with its spark hazard any where near an oil refinery.
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Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#13Well, I must say I didn't expect big corporations would get their "privacy" violated by tacking apps. Do you think it's cheaper to just buy back the data or to set up their own cell towers and block the app traffic?
Or just buy a load of cheap burner phones and fake out the data - use some cheap drones to make them move around :-)
A bit like some people hire actors to pretend you have more employees.
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#14Why would you allow a mobile phone with its spark hazard any where near an oil refinery.
Pretty sure the field teams aren't allowed them. Maybe in the foreman's trailer? Otherwise, as far as I understand, they can use them back in the cafeterias and locker rooms.
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#15I've heard from a friend who used to work in Houston refineries, that it's not unusual for refinery workers (who do carry mobile phones, by the way) to call their brokers immediately when they hear an explosion or see an unexpected plume of smoke from a neighboring refinery.
Also smoking on the job is apparently much more common at refineries than I would have expected.
Edit: this comment reflects the state of the industry 20 years ago, second hand. Take it for what it's worth.
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#16Why would you allow a mobile phone with its spark hazard any where near an oil refinery.
There are different zones. In Zone 0 or Zone 1 area you can't have any of that. Also there are special phones that can be used in those zones. Those things are basically bricks.
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#17I'm confused, throughout the article it mentions contractors being in oil facilities. But it also says "Orbital receives location data without any personal identification information and aggregates it." So how do they know these people are contractors? Or are they just measuring the raw number of people in the oil facilities?
If you have lots of location data say in Houston, and then suddenly in a refinery that's not in their normal day-to-day location data you could assume it's a contractor being called into investigate an on-site problem. or if you detect increased activity from devices that don't have a history on-site. Not 100%, but then they're not going for 100% either.
Step 1: Get list of recent past problems at different refineries from news or people there after the fact or any number of ways.
Step 2: Get past location data that includes these periods (but spans a much larger time).
Step 3: Analyze what's different about the problem times compared to normal operation.
In some cases, it might actually be as simple as X% of work force doesn't come in for normal shift on what is otherwise a normal day.
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#18I wonder if there's companies who sell ELD info similar to other examples listed in here about carriers and apps selling user info. Having ELD info from truckers around refineries and drill sites would give you a pretty good insight as to what's going on.
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#19Well, I must say I didn't expect big corporations would get their "privacy" violated by tacking apps. Do you think it's cheaper to just buy back the data or to set up their own cell towers and block the app traffic?
I don't think either of your proposed options are legal/possible. afaik this geo data isn't sold to a single party, and is collected through so many various channels purchasing them all would be quite expensive.
As far as making your own cell tower, I would love to know if this is even something a non telco company can do. I doubt creating any blocks for specific content would be possible or legal as well. How would you block https traffic, and how would you determine who is an employee and who is not?
This tracking is a result of allowing visitors to bring personal devices on prem. As long as they are personal devices administered by their owner I don't know what could be done to mitigate this.
The problem still exists if all phones are put into a faraday cage when they arrive at the site. Instead of tracking users at the plant they just track users who 'go offline' at the drop off site.
Getting employees to stop bringing personal devices is the only way to actually quell this fear. Even the US military has an issue with Strava run logs leaking data about the movement patterns in their bases.
Re: Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries
#20Well, I must say I didn't expect big corporations would get their "privacy" violated by tacking apps. Do you think it's cheaper to just buy back the data or to set up their own cell towers and block the app traffic?
>I didn't expect big corporations would get their "privacy" violated by tacking apps.
Why? Corporate espionage (either collecting metadata for speculation or exfiltrating corporate secrets) has the highest incentives around it.
Order of espionage I'd expect State>Corporation>Individual
The only thing that's changed in the past 30 years is surveillance/espionage has gotten cheap enough that it can be performed on individuals