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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

#591

Post by whatshisface »

wilsonnb wrote: post #588
alphydan wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. In your years of volunteering with the homeless you rubbed shoulders with the wrong people. Our data says you are Islamofilic. Please present yourself at the interrogation booth March 1st 2025. That's why.

At that point, what's to stop them from forcing me to present myself at the interrogation booth anyways? Does it matter if they have data "proving" that I've done something wrong, or if they just make it up?

The "evil government" can't actually gain anything by targeting people completely at random. They'll have some class of political enemies and be very happy if they have a way to identify them.

The problem is that, today, you can't predict what will get you in trouble tomorrow. So even if you intend to live your entire life in complete compliance with whatever the current government wants, you won't be able to live in compliance with what the next set wants in the future. You can't simulate liberty by keeping your head down - eventually you will disagree with the government.

To a lot of people, "disagreeing with the government" means convincing a population that is largely happy with the way things are that something unjust or wrong is happening. That's the pattern of civil rights, environmentalism, and other activist movements that we have had in the West. This is not the whole story: in countries and times with poorer situations, disagreeing with the government can mean a conflict with your own practical (economic) well-being, as a member of no particular minority. In fact it is all of this bean counting about rights an liberty that keeps us away from "disagreeing with the government" in ways that are easier to convince people about the significance of.

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

#592

Post by ajb »

raesene9 wrote: post #195
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…

if you want to get it to blow up then (based on past experience of what seems to catch regulator/legislator interest) I'd say that someone tracking the locations of a load of politicians for a while, finding things of interest about places they've visited and then publishing on a news outlet would do the job.

Malta Spitz (German politician) did this to himself in 2010: http://www.dw.com/en/german-politician-reveals-six-months-of...

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

#593

Post by coldacid »

stef25 wrote: post #568
noir_lord wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parralel construction. You pull the phone location records of everyone near a protest without a warrant (and no intention of using the location data in court) then you dig into them to find something unrelated to the protest you can nail them on. That way you take out key players without it looking like a political crackdown.

So this is just a way to bulk identify people in a certain location at a certain time. Fairly efficient I guess but could bring up a lot of false positives, like passers by, journalists etc

I would think that the people who would want to bulk identify people at certain events wouldn't consider tracked journalists to be false positives.

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

#594

Post by krageon »

wilsonnb wrote: post #585
King-Aaron wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many of the 16-million East Germans had this same utopian outlook on it.. Edit: While things are "good", I'm sure you and a lot of others don't see an issue. But you're giving yourself a lot of rope to be hung on if ever things become hard.

I guess my view of the situation is that the massive collection of data only becomes a problem in situations where we can absolutely not trust our government, and if things get that bad then we have much bigger problems than the government having a lot of data about us. At that point they don't need evidence of wrongdoing to drag people into the street and shoot them, so it doesn't matter to me if they have it.

The trouble is that they might target a group that you are logged to be a part of. For a concrete example, the reason the Nazis were so successful in finding Jews in the Netherlands is because the government there kept (and keeps, if I'm not mistaken) a list of people and which faith they belong to. That list was then handed over to the invaders, who made really good use of it in the time after.

Nobody before that point really stopped to consider whether or not it was a good idea this data existed in the hands of the people that had it. If they did, they probably thought there was nothing to hide (or even that it was a good idea, perhaps). At this point, we should know better. For the ones targeted, there were no bigger problems than the fact that someone had this data about them.

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

#595

Post by pixl97 »

bscphil wrote: post #517
jstarfish wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't help. Your next car will support telemetrics. Your insurer will know how fast and how often you drive. Your wife will know where you've been going after work. The cloud will gather and retain everything else of non-obvious value, up to the point where it all magically disappears when your self-piloting car drives itself through a schoolyard at recess and the company claims they don't have enough data to de…

Parts of your analysis are hyperbole, clearly, and I think that undercuts what are several very important points. There are still areas in which you can make choices. You can still buy appliances with no internet connections at all, or buy open hardware and run open source software. This is what I currently do. Surely inexpensive and/or used cars will dispense with GPS and other high tech features; in addition, I wou…

>You can still buy appliances with no internet connections at all, or buy open hardware and run open source software

For a little bit. As you say, bad money pushes out good money. Most people will buy devices with tracking. Since more of them will be made, their prices will be lower than devices without tracking. Especially since the tracking will be profitable for the companies making the devices. Eventually you'll find all devices have tracking hardware and on some it will just be disabled. Either unplugged physically, or turned off via software.

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

#596

Post by jakeogh »

sp332 wrote: post #583
jakeogh wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/napkin overestimate using US 6B/calls/day with a nationwide 256B packet each, that's roughly a 100Mbps broadcast channel, which is ~5 digital TV channels, or one geostationary satellite's half-duplex bandwidth if it could see the entire US. As mdhardeman points out, it's easier than that, and there is plenty of room for re-transmission. What is the passive bitrate of a tower->cell connection? LTE/GSM whatever.

With everyone's phones receiving and parsing that, batteries would die very quickly.

Pagers parse every single page. They only alert you when it's to your address. /napkin is just that, if you designed the protocol this would be very doable. The receiver can passively listen quite cheaply energy wise. This is nothing like decoding a video stream.

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

#597

Post by totalrobe »

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…

>Almost every web/smartphone mapping company is doing it

Are you aware of any device vendors and/or providers that aren't doing this?

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

#598

Post by willstrafach »

gcb0 wrote: post #236
heurist wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the space as well. I've tried telling my congressmen but they ignore me. I'm waiting for the backlash, especially will all the recent privacy issues. It hasn't happened yet and the problem is so large that I honestly doubt whether the public will ever truly grasp what the scope. The advice I always give when this topic comes up us to be very careful with what you install on your phone. The least expensive mobi…

that's only the low end. app gps usage shows up on the UI. the article discusses when the ISP/telco sells the data that you have zero visibility on. there's no way to get around this. btw, apple and google ad spyware process (google play service) will collect gps and wifi data without any user visible UI, not to mention download ads in the background.

> btw, apple and google ad spyware process (google play service) will collect gps and wifi data without any user visible UI, not to mention download ads in the background.

Would be nice to see actual proof of this. I am very familiar with all network traffic an iOS device may emit and do not know what you are referring to here.

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

#599

Post by mywittyname »

pcarolan wrote: post #550
jandrewrogers wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You and op work for companies you seem to fundamentally disagree with. Can you say why you don’t leave? Asking not out of judgment but to understand.

Because they will just hire someone else.

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

#600

Post by michaelt »

heurist wrote: post #177
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'm in the space as well. I've tried telling my congressmen but they ignore me. I'm waiting for the backlash, especially will all the recent privacy issues. It hasn't happened yet and the problem is so large that I honestly doubt whether the public will ever truly grasp what the scope. The advice I always give when this topic comes up us to be very careful with what you install on your phone. The least expensive mobi…

  I'm in the space as well. I've tried telling my
  congressmen but they ignore me.
If you have hard evidence, forward it to the journalist or newspaper that broke a similar recent story, or whose reporting of that story you respected.

Maybe you can find a journalist you respect for their reporting on Cambridge Analytica, the Paradise Papers, Edward Snowden and so on?

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