Comment by Qwertie
8 years ago
The worst part is there isn't any possible way I know of to defend yourself against this other than not having a phone.
8 years ago
The worst part is there isn't any possible way I know of to defend yourself against this other than not having a phone.
A while ago I thought of a very neat 'future job': you walk around town with somebody else's phone. So if you 'need to be' somewhere, you just hire this service, deliver your phone, which will be returned to you, and there goes your track record.
That's fairly easily detectable through analysis, though.
Not if you use a clowder of feral cats.
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yeah but... then the customer doesn't have their phone
I need my phone, especially when I'm out
Use a drone to fly your primary phone to the location and relay the call to your secondary phone on your person.
I'm hoping the Librem 5 succeeds. I think disabling the baseband would be a solve and at least slightly more trustworthy than airplane mode.
Right now I think you're right, there's no defending against it without turning off devices.
> more trustworthy than airplane mode
All airplane mode does is turn of transmitters. There is no reason that the firmware should stop caching GPS data for later transmission
That probably won't do much for you in many urban areas in many countries. Municipalities are routinely maintaining data captured from license-plate scanners and some cities now have CCTV networks with facial recognition software. So unless you don't drive and walk around with a new rubber mask on every day you are still subject to the panopticon.
Most businesses these days have some kind of camera system for security, it won't be too long now before someone starts buying these video feeds from say Starbucks, etc. running recognition AI on them, tagging individuals, and selling this aggregated location data, maybe even realtime. At the moment, I don't think this would even violate any privacy laws.
>So unless you don't drive and walk around with a new rubber mask on every day you are still subject to the panopticon.
Gotta invent that Scramble Suit!
What about a decentralized networks over 802.11?
It wouldn’t be a total solution, because access points get hacked, etc. but it would make the data a lot fuzzier.
The reason that cell phone networks actually work (they're effectively decentralized networks) is that they pay the big bucks to rent space on high towers, building roofs, etc.
The only thing that matters for radio communications is line of sight. The only thing that gives you line of sight is relative height. The only thing that gives you consistent height is money.
Voice over WiFi definintely works. I don’t think “works” is the word you are looking for. “Won’t have great coverage” is maybe what you were going for.
A WiFi-based network with stronger privacy characteristics would be valuable to the small part of the market who cares more about privacy than coverage. Those people exist, ya?
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>The only thing that gives you consistent height is money.
Or long rope, a balloon, and a heat source ;)
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Until/unless they modify the law - turning off your phone thwarts it. While your phone is powered off, it has no ability to track & record your location movements. Obviously your active location will then be picked back up after you power it on, it won't have a record of anything inbetween.
A simple example of limiting the invasiveness using this approach, would be to have your phone on only at work & home, or similar. In absence of phone snooping, someone can already easily locate you at those two standard destinations, and can easily discover when you'd typically be at those places (ie you're not giving them much by using your phone there under normal circumstances).
So, use Google voice or setup your own w/ Twilio (try all numbers), and have a work cellphone and a home cellphone, a one-way pager (for when you are traveling), and another travel phone without a battery that you would use if necessary, based on the pager message?
Does turning the phone off actually turn the baseband off though?
How could we possibly tell?
While unreliable it wouldn't be unrealistic to use wifi in densely populated areas. It looks like the pager industry is still alive, too.
Most wifi hotspots have location information anyway, so your phone will know where it is, and then one of the many apps on your phone can report back with that information.
And isn't a pager just a really simple cell phone? I'm not sure how that's a solution if cell towers can triangulate your position.
I should have been clearer: One way pagers seem to still exist. They do not transmit.
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I wonder if even an old iPod Touch withought a cellular chip would actually be a useful decice for this kind of wi-fi-only connectivity.
You still can't be sure. Your car may contain a SIM card nowadays, always connected, for your protection, sure thing.