Live data from Hacker News

How First Wap tracks phones around the world

lighthousereports.com

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: How First Wap tracks phones around the world

#11

At some point you have to wonder how privacy and security wasnt a factor at all in the minds of engineers designing these systems- it has to be intentional, right? Did no one stop to consider how the system theyre building could be abused against the general public? Did they just not care?

[deleted]

Re: How First Wap tracks phones around the world

#14

At some point you have to wonder how privacy and security wasnt a factor at all in the minds of engineers designing these systems- it has to be intentional, right? Did no one stop to consider how the system theyre building could be abused against the general public? Did they just not care?

Most likely security was a factor, and they did care, but in all the wrong ways. See this post about 2G, but SS7 was (and is, hence it has not been upgraded) probably under the same pro-surveillance pressure:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25284892

Re: How First Wap tracks phones around the world

#16

At some point you have to wonder how privacy and security wasnt a factor at all in the minds of engineers designing these systems- it has to be intentional, right? Did no one stop to consider how the system theyre building could be abused against the general public? Did they just not care?

My perspective is that at some point you have to consider that security wasn't as great of a threat actor in the 1980's. Even only in the last decade have we seen us move from IT security to more cyber security measures for the average organization.

Those systems were designed with security in mind for the environment and threat model of that time. It is why these types of things are grandfathered or improved upon to mitigate the latest scenarios and threat actors. The difference is that they probably couldn't foresee that it would remain the foundation for so long, and what todays world would look like.

Re: How First Wap tracks phones around the world

#20

At some point you have to wonder how privacy and security wasnt a factor at all in the minds of engineers designing these systems- it has to be intentional, right? Did no one stop to consider how the system theyre building could be abused against the general public? Did they just not care?

There are a huge amount of people that don't spend time thinking about ways thing can be misused.
Post reply on HN