Your Cell Phone Is Tracking You 453
PollGuy writes "I had never heard until this article in the New York Times (sacrifice of first born required) about services that let regular people track the locations of other regular people via their cell phones. Nor this: 'A federal mandate that wireless carriers be able to locate callers who dial 911 automatically by late 2005 means that millions of phones already keep track of their owners' whereabouts.'"
a simple solution (Score:2, Insightful)
That's weird... (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems unnecessary... Wouldn't it be possible to just have the cell phone programmed to export the necessary coord data when someone hits 911?
not new. (Score:5, Insightful)
i personally see a good use for this (911) and dont see the big deal since you could just not carry your cell with you for that ultra-top-secret-underground tinfoil hat clan meeting.
i am more worried about things you cannot opt out of, like face scanning in public places. or non-approval required phone taps etc
Re:a simple solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Triangulation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:many phones can disable this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not good. (Score:3, Insightful)
Spouses should not have the ability to spy on one another either.
Can now. It's called a private detective.
Without guidelines, tracking very well might become widespread because it is forced down the throats of people who get their cell phones through their companies, schools, or otherwise don't pay their own bill.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Re:many phones can disable this (Score:4, Insightful)
woot, FREE CALLS FOR EVERYONE!!!!11111
Re:Hah, BUSTED! (Score:4, Insightful)
That argument's not new either (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course this technology has legitimate uses. If you'd bothered to read the article, you would have noticed that the privacy advocates were not objecting to the technology itself, but to the absence of control over who gets access to the data.
Re:Non-GPS-enabled phones... (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue of providers tracking you is a completely separate problem. As long as the user remains in control (ie, I can choose to allow my phone to transmit GPS information to my provider or caller), then we're fine. Personally I'd have it always set to never allow another party to get my (x,y) unless I was using an emergency call. The rest of the time I'd be using the GPS capability with a local device for my own needs. We just need to ensure that phones don't go "DRM-style", where they are doing things against your will.
Re:Non-GPS-enabled phones... (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be a great idea if a mother is tracking her child. It's not such a great idea if a stalker is doing the same.
Re:not new. (Score:3, Insightful)
It will be abused somewhere down the line. (Score:4, Insightful)
The point is, they could. If they don't have the tools to do so, then they definately can't. This gives the government a easy tool to track people, especially as cell phone use becomes more and more widespread (as if it isn't already.)
While someone may not be sitting there tracking every movement, it would be feasible to assume that all your data gets dumped into a database for later use. We already store incoming and outgoing calls, why not locations?
Let's say a robbery took place at a store. You were on the other side of the building and didn't see it. However, the resolution of the GPS wasn't good enough to pinpoint which side of the building you were on, only that you were in proximity. The police come knocking on your door, and now your a suspect.
I go to public parks often to sit and read. I have no kids. I don't want some stupid computer program to assume I have no reason to be there, flagging me as a pedophile because I happen to read on kids playgrounds.
So lame.. (Score:2, Insightful)
GOOD! (Score:5, Insightful)
Calling 911 implies it's an emergency, you need the police NOW.
This doesn't bode well (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but an important part of growing up is getting at least a taste of true freedom and yes, sometimes the risk that it entails. . When I was a teenager I probably did a few things my parents wouldn't have approved of, and I that was an important part of my experience.
I can't imagine imposing this on my own teenager, except (1) when he actively wants it, if say he goes into a strange part of town, or (2) as punishment if he gets into trouble - part of the punishment might be that he would be monitored for the next two months or whatever. If he wants to be monitored all the time,
Re:This just in... (Score:5, Insightful)
I gotta get me one of them!
More Tools For Bad Parents (Score:2, Insightful)
As an adult, if someone were tracking me at least I would have some legal recourse. But what do you do when its your parents? Sue them? I guess that's been tried before too...
Ohh Great (Score:3, Insightful)
So I just got a new treo 600 and like all new cell phones it has e911. This means it has a GPS reciever and all that shit in it, however, like most new cell phones it lacks the code or chip to do the GPS processing. If you can now get commercial spying services why the hell can't they enable a GPS service without an expansion card.
Seriously though this is a somewhat worrying trend. Not so much because of the lose of privacy, although that isn't good but because of the *differential* loss in privacy. I think it was David Brin who commented that this was the real problem and while I don't know his reasons I agree with him. If corporate execs were as likely to have their minor transgressions traced as teenagers we would learn to forgive these transgression that have happened since the begining of time. As it is we will once again blame it on the moral failings of the youth.
Ironically it seems that it is our concern for privacy that will cause the problems. We will only let surveilance happen in certain specialized areas, those areas that "morally good upright" citizens won't be in. It will be okay to surveill only those people who regularly come within some many feet of a known drug hangout...but not a buisnessman who buys his coke from a friend at work.
Key Passages from the Article (Score:2, Insightful)
Unfortunately technologies get deployed LONG before appropriate legislation get enacted. Governments are often like Dionsaurs living in the age of Mammals (ie they're just not built to react quickly to change).
"We are moving into a world where your location is going to be known at all times by some electronic device," said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. "It's inevitable. So we should be talking about its consequences before it's too late."
Unfortunately, most people subscribe to the DKDC model of living. (Don't know, don't care) And it's often left to a vocal (and knowledgable) minority who end up being painted as "the lunatic fringe" by the mass media.
Advocates of location-aware technology insist that its safety benefits -- like locating a 911 caller or a stolen car -- outweigh the privacy issues.
The technology itself is not the issue (the technology is NEVER the issue), the issue is who has access and under what conditions. They're completely missing the point - why can we not have a situation where the privacy and the technology play together nicely in the sandpit?
Re:Triangulation (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, yes, triangulating on the strength of the signal would be pretty tricky because the strength is not proportional to distance. So it's not done like that.
GSM timing requirements are quite tight, and so the phone needs to know when to transmit to not clobber other calls on the cell. So there's a small amount of negotiation (effectively a ping) which tells them what the transmission delay is. Since we already know the speed of light, it's trivial to turn that delay into a distance.
HONEY ... why was your cell phone off? (Score:1, Insightful)
At your girlfriends having a shag
Options... (Score:4, Insightful)
For what it's worth, many years ago when I crossed paths with some cell-phone product design types, there was a hybrid product concieved, originally to improve service and battery life -- a pager/cell phone. (We're not talking SMS here, but plain old POCSAG paging.)
Anyway, with this approach you could work if you wished to retain positional anonymity -- have a conventional pager (which is just a reciever) notify you of calls, then choose to power up the cell or not.
As practically every other post has pointed out, positioning by radio has no requirement of GPS being present. Any transmitter can be position located. Amateur radio opertators actually have contests to do this -- foxhunts -- and the equipment to do position finding of non-spread-spectrum tranmitters is pretty trivial to make or buy. [ramseyelectronics.com]
If you want your whereabouts to remain unknown, don't transmit. Simple as that.
Re:This just in... (Score:2, Insightful)
2) Nobody said "anyone"
3) Yes.
a) Ticket for talking while driving?
b) Where were you on the night of BLAH?.. Oh
yeah, well your phone says you were HERE!
c) A text message saying "Would you like to
buy some CRAP?" as you walk by the CRAP
store.
Re:Rape button (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This just in... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's illegal, and I personally think you're an asshole for doing it, and think you deserve to have a ticket, with a three strike no license policy.
b) Where were you on the night of BLAH?.. Oh yeah, well your phone says you were HERE!.
So you are suggesting that police with a warrant should not have this information? This ties in with...
c) A text message saying "Would you like to buy some CRAP?" as you walk by the CRAP store.
Once again you are assuming anyone has it. Damn boy.
Re:This just in... (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody said "anyone"
Now, please re-evaluate all of the above provided that you dont know WHO can access such information.
Re:Cell Phoney Tracking (Score:3, Insightful)
#1: caring whether people know where you are does not mean you have something to hide.
#2: having something to hide does not mean people should be entitled to know about it.
#3: the number of cellphones being used in a given area has very little to do with the likelihood that someone will care where you are. It has much more to do with who knows that you're carrying a lot of cash, or who thinks that you have too much freedom in your relationship and need to be reigned in via generic oversight.
Re:This just in... Well, in for a while now... (Score:5, Insightful)
I later bought the same phone again and decided to use a headset for the hearing problem.
The real problem with the technology is not that the cops can track you. As far as I know, they have *always* had that ability: the machinery knows that the signal from your phone is strongest between n points on the network and if you make a call, your approximate location is knowable by the system in realtime.
Another problem, of course, are what they keep mentioning on 'Law and Order,' your LUDs or 'Local Usage Details.' It's a record of everyone you call and everyone who calls you.
Big hint, before calling anyone for a criminal transaction from your own cell phone, try on some bright-orange clothing and make sure you look good in it. It is one of the stupidest things you could possibly do--especially when you can buy anonymous, 'pay-as-you-go' cell phone service for minor amounts of money.
The real problem that the 'Law-and-Order' people, the ones who never met a form of privacy they didn't loath, is not that the cops can track you, illegally search you, or sweat a false confession out of you. All in all, American police can be great, but they can and have done all these things at one time or another.
The problem with technology is that the law is a game and it has to be a game for it to work. It would be bad for society if it were possible to automatically find someone guilty and technology is bringing us closer to the day when that will be possible in more and more areas.
From traffic-cams to face-recognition software, technologies are bringing us closer to a national security state where you don't do only good things because you want to, but because common sense tells you you should be scared shitless of doing anything else.
Re:This just in... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, its not illegal. Not sure where you live, but in the US there's only a few places where it is illegal to use a hand-held phone without a headset, but there is no place in the US where it is illegal to USE a phone while driving with a headset. In fact, a few years ago there was talk about making it part of the drivers test in Hawaii.
b) Where were you on the night of BLAH?.. Oh yeah, well your phone says you were HERE!. So you are suggesting that police with a warrant should not have this information? This ties in with...
Correct, they should not have this information without your consent. This is a fifth amendment issue.
c) A text message saying "Would you like to buy some CRAP?" as you walk by the CRAP store. Once again you are assuming anyone has it. Damn boy.
The information is owned by a private company, so they can do whatever they please with it, including selling some or all of it to the CRAP store for the purpose described. As soon as someone figures out how to market it properly, anyone with the $$ will have it.
Re:Rape button (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This just in... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the wrong example to use. A more correct example would run something like this:
"Mister Anderson, our records indicate that you spent a portion of last night attending a political rally for a certain political candidate. You should realize the policies promoted by that candidate would be detrimental to the corporate objectives of this organization and could result in our having to terminate certain employees. You have a choice to make, Mister Anderson, do I make myself clear?"
Paris Hilton school of Personal Priorities (Score:2, Insightful)