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US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

zdnet.com

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Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#201

Post by erikpukinskis »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #101
prklmn wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another part of the American mystique is that every politician is for sale via legal bribery where companies donate to their campaigns and get them to do mostly whatever the company wants, totally contrary to the interests of the public.

And somehow people trust those bribing companies more than the politicians?

They do, some folks.

The idea is companies, caring only about their own revenue, are purer of heart than politicians who are interested primarily in their own social status.

... that a kind of bulk morality emerges from many individuals all working to maximize a single product’s sales.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#202

Post by rinze »

Qwertie wrote: post #35

The worst part is there isn't any possible way I know of to defend yourself against this other than not having a phone.

A while ago I thought of a very neat 'future job': you walk around town with somebody else's phone. So if you 'need to be' somewhere, you just hire this service, deliver your phone, which will be returned to you, and there goes your track record.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#203

Post by stef25 »

random6547545 wrote: post #44

Throwaway account. I work in location / mapping / geo. Some of us have been waiting for this to blow (which it hasn't yet). The public has zero idea how much personal location data is available. It's not just your cell carrier. Your cell phone chip manufacturer, GPS chip manufacturer, phone manufacturer and then pretty much anyone on the installed OS (android crapware) is getting a copy of your location data. Usually…

Allow me to ask some questions :)

> It's not just your cell carrier

No reason to think this is only US right?

> cell phone chip manufacturer, GPS chip manufacturer

How & when is this transmitted and what other data apart from lat & long?

> pretty much anyone on the installed OS [...] is getting a copy of your location data

You mean the devs of whatever app is installed on the phone? The outgoing data should be visible in things like Charles proxy, right?

Is this analogous to FB data being available to any dev that gets permission to access your profile?

> It's normal to track hundreds of millions of people a day and trade stocks based on where they go

Whaaa ... ? Do explain, fascinating.

Can this all be mitigated by those smartphones-hardened-for-criminals type devices?

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#204

Post by cryoshon »

random6547545 wrote: post #44

Throwaway account. I work in location / mapping / geo. Some of us have been waiting for this to blow (which it hasn't yet). The public has zero idea how much personal location data is available. It's not just your cell carrier. Your cell phone chip manufacturer, GPS chip manufacturer, phone manufacturer and then pretty much anyone on the installed OS (android crapware) is getting a copy of your location data. Usually…

okay, so, to cut to the chase here: how do we disrupt or destroy the companies doing this?

it isn't acceptable that they are taking advantage of us in this way.

we can't expect any political solution to the problem, which leaves us to pursue other means if we want to protect ourselves.

is there a way to introduce fake data or noise? what about opting out?

is there a law being broken here that we can make into a lawsuit? i wonder if there is a precedent regarding restraining orders or unwanted surveillance by private entities...

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#205

Post by awelkie »

ethbro wrote: post #170
awelkie wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calls could be done over IP, and as long as you could anonymously authenticate to the tower then you could be granted a new IP address at each tower via something like DHCP. I imagine roaming and handovers would have to be done on the end-device though; the end-device would need to proactively associate to new towers and both ends of the voice call would need to agree to switch to the new IP address. But if the tower…

If you really wanted to do this, a more secure approach is onion routing. It's essentially the same problem -- attempting to preserve anonymity in the face of adversarial network hardware, while being limited by a requirement to enter / exit through certain nodes. So you'd want a mesh network, formed adhoc out of currently in range cellular device neighbors, with packets re-encapsulated and encrypted at each hop, eve…

Oh yeah, that's an interesting solution.

I'm not sure simultaneous authorization and anonymization is impossible. Couldn't you use something like Chaum's e-cash to obtain tokens that guarantee the holder the right to use the network for some amount of data, but these tokens are tradeable and therefore the spender doesn't have to be the same as the buyer. Then you could spend this token in the network to get access and the network could authenticate the token without identifying the spender. I'm guessing something like zcash could be used as well...

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#206

Post by Spooky23 »

I’m shocked that anyone is shocked about this! Transportation departments have been buying this data since the late 90s.

More creepy are the planning solutions for commercial development. You can buy datasets that will tell you the average income of drivers on larger highways in hourly buckets.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#207

Post by codedokode »

stevehawk wrote: post #34
izacus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you've created a corporate Big Brother, who is hell bent on pure profits and doesn't even have to answer to you in the elections. Is that better?

Yes? Government Big Brother can put me in jail just because a cell phone record said I was near a crime while being committed. Corporate Big Brother can only make money from me.

What stops Corporate Brother from voluntarily sharing/selling/giving data to the government out of patriotism? Or for some help in exchange. Especially if done unofficially.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#208

Post by stef25 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #93
random6547545 wrote: post #44

Throwaway account. I work in location / mapping / geo. Some of us have been waiting for this to blow (which it hasn't yet). The public has zero idea how much personal location data is available. It's not just your cell carrier. Your cell phone chip manufacturer, GPS chip manufacturer, phone manufacturer and then pretty much anyone on the installed OS (android crapware) is getting a copy of your location data. Usually…

I can confirm this is happening, I designed some of the analysis systems used. Contrary to what many people assume, this is not just a US thing. It is done throughout the industrialized world to varying degrees, including countries where most people believe privacy protections disallow such activity. Governments tacitly support it because they've found these capabilities immensely useful for their own purposes.

> for their own purposes

Such as?

If this also happens in the EU and is as blatant as you say it is and with GDPR and all, surely this is just waiting to blow up?

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#209

Post by delecti »

stevehawk wrote: post #12
RubenSandwich wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the American mythology is that government involvement is always bad. It's hard for me to know if this developed because of the myths of the America Revolution, that a small colony won it alone and not because of external factors, and how much is due to people preaching small government politics. Regardless a distrust of the government seems to be ingrained in the American psyche IMO.

Ahaha what? There's no myth that we won it alone. Elementary school texts on the subject lay it out fairly clearly that we did it with the French.

Even if it were factually accurate that we won it alone, the story of the revolutionary war has still taken on mythic status in our society. The revolutionary war is just as much a mythic story as many religious stories.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#210

Post by aerotwelve »

chillingeffect wrote: post #127
malvosenior wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You leave out another option: Americans distrust government because we see it fail us every day. Corruption, police brutality, inefficiency, politician sleaze baggery... In general corporations provide a much higher quality service than the government in the US.

You make a good point about the government, but I don't agree it extends to corporations. Corporations do much of the dirty work of the government. Defense contractors and mining concerns operate hand-in-hand with the government, training police, researching weapons, running prisons, crunching data. Look at the story of this article: it's corporations doing the dirty work the government isn't technically allowed to d…

> ...There are some valuable services provided to them, like closed captioning, but only under passioned support from idealists and with profit incentive.

It's worth noting that video closed captioning had to be mandated by law (Telecommunications Act of 1996) before it became universal[1]. Some broadcasters were ahead of the curve & implemented it prior to the legislation, but it was rarely comprehensive.

Of course, this just underscores your point that disabled consumers were not a large enough group to have their needs met by market forces alone.

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/general/telecommunications-act-1996-and-...

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