I regret getting a pixel, and not a fairphone with a removable battery With the current level of oversight on the police (police of police is a meme by now), and the level of cybersecurity at the government, everyone's phones will be activated within a few months. At least some government agent will have fun watching what ppl visit on the internet during their spare time, and can enable the camera to watch what they'…
France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
411–420 of 465 posts
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. They can locate anyone's phone on demand. The services that do this can generate a likely street address from GPS or tower triangulated location. This is how many criminals now get caught while on the run. It isn't magic police work but rather the personal tracking device everyone carries. Likewise some spree killers have been tracked down by geofencing phones known to be around all crime scenes and zeroing in on…
Cell phones are only connected to 1 tower afaik. So no triangulation is possible, only the tower they are connected to, which is very broad.
Look at the tower. It would have at least 3 antennas giving at least a 120 degree segment. As soon as a phone connects to another one you would have a line (or more like an ellipsoid) between the two towers. Even if the phone just lies on the desk it could switch towers, eg if the current one has too many clients, or the signal quality is pretty equal between them.
NB I worked in a such place, my phone would be in low 40-50% at the end of the work day, despite being able to endure two days easily if I would be at some other place.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s for the person who is actively calling 911 though, not a random persons phone.
In the cases I’m familiar with it was often used for other people calling in suspected suicide attempts (or other types of self harm, or drug overdoses, ect…)
I am a reporter who covers crime. Your account is 100% accurate. Federal law allows for the disclosure of customer records “to a governmental entity, if the provider, in good faith, believes that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay of information relating to the emergency.” 5 U.S.C § 2703(c).
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#414United States, couple years ago my friend in his mid-thirties was feeling depressed after his mom died. Came over to hang out, and wasn’t responding to his sisters calls. His sister called in a welfare check on him and suddenly I have three cops knocking at my front door. They ask for him by name, say he isn’t in trouble. I go get him; he asks “how did you know where I was?” and the cops say “we pinged your phone”. W…
That is plainly allowed under federal law.
Pursuant to 5 U.S.C § 2703(c), a provider “may divulge a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber to or customer of such service (not including the contents of communications covered by subsection (a)(1) or (a)(2)”…“to a governmental entity, if the provider, in good faith, believes that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay of information relating to the emergency.”
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
Y Combinator is an American company and the website is hosted in the US.
Google, reddit, amazon, twitter, and every meta website too. This is a dumb observation. US people needs to stop pretending the USA are the only place that matters on earth.
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Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've (unfortunately) got a habit of accidentally assuming forums are "in the US". I think I would put it down to a couple of things: 1. Most native English speakers are in the US, so the accidental assumption that someone is American is more often than not correct. 2. The internal voice that reads text to me has a generic male American accent.
The US is the largest country with english speakers, but it does not have the majority of speakers [1] (just India plus Pakistan have as many). So your assumption would be wrong, even based on statistics. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English...
That's why I qualified it with "native" - the US has by far the most English-as-a-first-language people. In my head everyone speaks like an Anglo guy from Idaho, and since HN is text-only, metaphorically speaking the lights are out, so I'm left without a clue where other people are sitting or where they are from.
In other words, if you found yourself in a dark room with a thousand English speakers who all sounded like Jesse Pinkman, what country would you assume you were in?
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#417From the French Revolution, to this. How far the mighty have fallen.
I mean, the French Revolution was very-shortly-followed by the Terror, so we can hardly present this as a simple slow decline from a golden age.
what you call red terror was merely a preludium to the much more servere and large scale 'white terror' the royalists and their supporters comitted much more horrifying and large scale terror on a massive scale. The right-wing terror that followed the revolution is somehow never mentioned. I guess people still buy into the scarlet pimpernel bs.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#418Meanwhile China is bad.
Both are bad, the French aren't currently forcibly sterilizing, enslaving, and genociding a culture like the Chinese are doing with Uyghers, however. So there are different levels of bad.
You are right, what's a little surveillance between friends. It's not like they're acting like the Chinese at all.
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US imprisons tons of people, with a strong bias towards certain races. Are our prisons meaningfully different from "reeducation camps"? Are they any less biased, brutal, or damaging? You can argue that prisoners in the US are "criminals", but states can call whoever they want a criminal.
This is totally ridiculous. China is literally committing genocide. They are kidnapping innocent people and harvesting their organs.
What is ridiculous is that China is vigurously criticised in every news outlet in the West on every occasion, while the French gov't gets away with almost everything. Can you explain that?
Re: France passes bill to allow police remotely activate phone camera, microphone
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
what is "our" government? this site is worldwide..
I've (unfortunately) got a habit of accidentally assuming forums are "in the US". I think I would put it down to a couple of things: 1. Most native English speakers are in the US, so the accidental assumption that someone is American is more often than not correct. 2. The internal voice that reads text to me has a generic male American accent.
I'd be willing to bet that less than half of this site's users are American. There is a huge software engineering community in Europe, for example, and there are more Europeans than Americans, let alone the large populations of Asia, Australia, New Zealand...
English is the dominant second language in the world.