401–410 of 465 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Police need a warrant to get location data from your cell phone provider. No department is bothering with that for a welfare check unless the situation is really dire, and the process still takes a while to carry out. "Where do you think your brother is?" "Oh probably at XYZ's place" is a much more straightforward and common process.
Police need a warrant to demand that data. Nothing stops the provider from handing it over willingly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36614678
Either corporations are allowed to be 'pressured' by the government or they aren't. But of course the legal system will make themselves a nice carveout for their uses like always.
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I think the question was "how did the phone company know the location", and GPS may be part of the answer. In the US, E911 requires all phones to be able to report their physical location. Phone companies may use this ability to respond to police location requests. I don't know one way or another, but it seems likely.
Do phone companies have access to that when the phone isn't actively placing a 911 call?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the cops say “we pinged your phone”. What that entails exactly I have no clue. The cell phone infrastructure knows where your phone is. It has to in order for it to operate. The police routinely ask cell phone companies for locations of cell phones. Many (most?) not only won't require a warrant, but provide an official portal the police can use to conduct their queries without having to get a phone company employee…
Correct me if I'm wrong, but cell phone companies only know which tower you are currently connected to. So it's pretty inaccurate. The only thing that is "house accurate" is the GPS on your phone. That means they need access to your phone to get that info. Remark that GPS doesn't need to be turned on. Google mapped all Wifi's and so can locate you without GPS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the cops say “we pinged your phone”. What that entails exactly I have no clue. The cell phone infrastructure knows where your phone is. It has to in order for it to operate. The police routinely ask cell phone companies for locations of cell phones. Many (most?) not only won't require a warrant, but provide an official portal the police can use to conduct their queries without having to get a phone company employee…
Correct me if I'm wrong, but cell phone companies only know which tower you are currently connected to. So it's pretty inaccurate. The only thing that is "house accurate" is the GPS on your phone. That means they need access to your phone to get that info. Remark that GPS doesn't need to be turned on. Google mapped all Wifi's and so can locate you without GPS.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's always the faraday bag or simply not taking it to your meeting/activity that have been the recommended options for opsec even when phones had removable batteries.
Regarding the Faraday bag, as I mentioned in another comment, that is not useful because the phone could be recording your audio anyway and then just transmit it later when you take it out of the bag. What you'd really want is some kind of soundproof box, but I'm not sure if an effective one exists because microphones can be sensitive and audio recordings can be amplified.
They could at least have the decency to just secretly do it and then pretend like they aren't, like our government does. This is why physical switches and removable batteries are the only way forward.
You'd gain nothing. What are you going to do, remove the battery for a couple hours per day?
And then if there's any crime, the police is going to immediately suspect anyone who had the battery removed from their cell phone at the time, which they can trivially detect.
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Also, I recall that the green light on the apple camera is controlled by the camera's firmware, making it more difficult to turn on without the light come on. (You'd need to overwrite the camera firmware.)
Why does this even need to be controlled with firmware? Can't it be a simple circuit? (I know nothing about this)
I just did some brief research, and it seems that it was the case prior to some point in time between 2008 and 2019, but it is now hard-wired. It is discussed near the end of https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/on_covering_webcams
The engineer quoted in the article pointed out that it may be possible (at least in 2019) to briefly turn the camera on - flashing the led too quickly for someone to see.
I didn't find a discussion of this issue in the May 2022 Apple Platform Security guide.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the cops say “we pinged your phone”. What that entails exactly I have no clue. The cell phone infrastructure knows where your phone is. It has to in order for it to operate. The police routinely ask cell phone companies for locations of cell phones. Many (most?) not only won't require a warrant, but provide an official portal the police can use to conduct their queries without having to get a phone company employee…
The question is how accurate is cell tower triangulation?
Civil rights are a favor that can be revoked at any time. Ultimately, there are too few who stand up for them. Today I read an article by Bernard-Henri Lévy, a liberal intellectual. He downplays police violence, order must be restored, how is not so important.
That doesn't sound very liberal. ("Liberal" meaning "in favor of freedom for people".) It doesn't even sound very politically liberal, meaning "in favor of peoples' right to protest injustice" and "in favor of peoples' right to not be shot dead by police". Isn't "order" the concern of the conservatives? I've heard a number of times that politically left and right mean different things in Europe; is this one of those…