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Burner Phone 101

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Re: Burner Phone 101

#81

Post by codethief »

eduction wrote: post #65
schoen wrote: post #39

When I was working at EFF, I started writing (but never finished) a couple of essays along the lines of "the degree of trackability of mobile phones is an unfortunate accident, and we should fix it". It basically comes from routing requirements (especially to receive incoming phone calls) combined with billing requirements (to make people pay for their connectivity) combined with the empirical requirement to see whic…

Stellar reasoning. Did you ever get to the point of hypothesizing good ways to align incentives to make this happen? It is hard to tell (having not thought much about it) whether this is a “smart well meaning engineers need to make new standards” problem, a “we need to harness the power of corporate greed problem,” or something else.

I seem to remember a discussion here on HN a few years back about a paper which outlined ways to decouple technical identifiers from personal identifiers on mobile networks.

My memory is a bit hazy but maybe it was the whitepaper for PGPP[0] that OP mentioned?

[0]: https://invisv.com/pgpp/

Re: Burner Phone 101

#82

Post by codethief »

cguess wrote: post #22

The guide recommends PGPP to rotate IMEI numbers, however, the service shut down more than a year ago. https://invisv.com/articles/service_shutdown.html

I wish the article you linked wasn't so thin on details:

> Unfortunately, due to technical issues outside of our control, we have to shut down our subscription services.

Re: Burner Phone 101

#84

Post by inportb »

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t wrote: post #15
pdesi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in airplane mode?

I dare you to do the following: Charge phone to full 100%. Turn it off. Put it into a faraday cage, e.g. a steel box, for 7 days. Take it out again and wonder why the battery is empty. (The faraday cage has the effect of making the modem have to switch bands constantly, which costs more electricity than sleep mode in LTE)

Interesting, but you should probably use a control. Two phones, same hardware, same software. One inside the faraday cage, one outside, both in the same room with the same conditions otherwise.

Repeat the experiment a few times. Then cross over: liberate the caged phone, cage the free phone, and repeat the experiment a few more times. Or alternate the phones' positions between experiments. This mitigates hardware and software differences that might've been overlooked (such as a faulty battery, etc).

Analyze the results, draw your conclusions, publish, and encourage others to reproduce.

Re: Burner Phone 101

#87

Post by thfuran »

eduction wrote: post #65
schoen wrote: post #39

When I was working at EFF, I started writing (but never finished) a couple of essays along the lines of "the degree of trackability of mobile phones is an unfortunate accident, and we should fix it". It basically comes from routing requirements (especially to receive incoming phone calls) combined with billing requirements (to make people pay for their connectivity) combined with the empirical requirement to see whic…

Stellar reasoning. Did you ever get to the point of hypothesizing good ways to align incentives to make this happen? It is hard to tell (having not thought much about it) whether this is a “smart well meaning engineers need to make new standards” problem, a “we need to harness the power of corporate greed problem,” or something else.

I don’t think it’s possible to align incentives in favor of rolling out such a statement in the US without another coup.

Re: Burner Phone 101

#88

Post by whartung »

Are satellite phones under the same microscope as cell phones? Are they broadcasting on all the different cell/wifi/bt frequencies or do they just connect to a satellite? Are they GPS tagged?

Also if you want one-way “location less” communication, the old alphanumeric pager network is still available.

I think those messages are simply broadcast across the network (which at least in the US is national). There’s evidence of a message being sent, none about whether it was received or where it was received.

Re: Burner Phone 101

#90

Post by bigiain »

Ccecil wrote: post #24

One thing I didn't see covered is to never have your "real phone" and your "burner phone" on you (or in the same location) at the same time while powered. Easy enough to say "Gee...these 2 phones are always together or nearby when activated" or "this phone shuts off right before this one powers up". Although, I suspect there are a few other ways to determine identity easier. Such as tracking the device identifier and…

Also, never power up or down, or switch in or out of airplane mode on your burner while at home (or work). Cellular network disconnection and connection events are rare and hence notable.
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