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The thing that scares me the most about the LocationSmart stuff is that I can't think of any workaround besides "don't use cellular data".
by conradev 8y ago
The thing that scares me the most about the LocationSmart stuff is that I can't think of any workaround besides "don't use cellular data".
- voodootrucker 8y agoIt works as long as your phone is turned on and within range of at least one cell tower. Whether you have data turned on is irrelevant, along with phone type, OS, smart or dumb - This affects all cell users.
- bigiain 8y agoSo what if we had a pool of "shared" 3/4G wifi hotspots with burner SIMs - kind of like bookcrossing - where you use one for a while then send it on to another member - a "sharing economy" of hotspots, "like Uber, but for cellular data". Then you use them with a non-cellular equipped device (iPod Touch?) or perhaps trust airplane mode with Wi-Fi turned on - and use Signal/iMessage/Facetime/whatever... I wonder how hard it'd be to route incoming calls to my phone (as in, the one with a SIM registered in my name) to a vpn-ed non-cellular device? You could probably make a very plausible looking "Gets up, goes to work, stops at a bar on the way home some days, gets back home, goes to sleep." routine while still being connected while you phone is on the desk at work of the coffee table at home. (or perhaps on the Roomba at home, so it still moves around a little...)
- beagle3 8y agoOne of two things: 1) Someone uses it for nefarious purposes, everyone involved gets implicated and investigated (in no small part in an attempt to drive people away from this model), no one wants to use these things anymore. 2) It works reasonably well, becomes a business, and big business provides for a small fee (perhaps free except for watching ads and your location data....) those hotspots and decimate the critical mass needed for this into unusefulness. If you think that's far fetched, this has already happened: consider email - it used to be distributed. There is now a copy of ~90% of emails on a Google/Microsoft server because at least one of the senders/recipients uses a hosted account. You can't really win an infrastructure game against established player using their own infrastructure; And the barrier to entry is so huge it's unlikely you'll be able to set up your own.
- watt 8y agoIt is not productive to think up technological solutions where a political one is required. Legislate for stronger privacy. Disallow companies to collect/store this data.
- bigiain 8y agoYou're probably right, and the EU are trying at least - but there's also an argument that once "the genie is out of the bottle", there's no way to stuff it back in. A friend of mine makes a very persuasive argument that Facebook has demonstrated how to manipulate vast numbers of people at mass scale - so much so that shutting Facebook down would no longer make any difference - now that it's known to be possible, it's much easier for anybody else to copy what's public and work out how to make the "private" algorithms work. A long-ish read, but a lot of that argument is here: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-last-days-of-reality/ https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-last-days-of-reality/ and here: https://ukvid.net/video/mark-pesce-on-the-end-of-reality-fPA9g7y2F2w.html https://ukvid.net/video/mark-pesce-on-the-end-of-reality-fPA...
- tunap 8y agoI always assumed on or off, as long as battery was in & had charge. Hence, the proliferation of SoC(exclusively) & non-removable batts(aka elegant design).
- mcrady 8y agoDo you have a source for that? Even without cellular data turned on, carriers know your rough location based on cell tower locations.
- conradev 8y agoYeah, oops, I meant "don't turn on your cellphone".
- RHSeeger 8y agoExcept that they can just turn your phone back on remotely, should they want to.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoThere is no [citation needed] big enough for this incredible claim.
- firmgently 8y agoNot to imply that it can just be done easily to every phone, or without preparation or perhaps previous physical access, but this concept has come up more than once in the mainstream news in recent years. So this level of incredulity seems misplaced. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/07/22/nsa_can_reportedly_track_cellphones_even_when_they_re_turned_off.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/07/22/nsa_can_r... https://www.tomsguide.com/us/nsa-remotely-turn-on-phones,news-18854.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/nsa-remotely-turn-on-phones,new...
- RHSeeger 8y agoHonestly, I thought it was a well known thing by now. A quick search on google turns up multiple writeups. > "Can anyone turn it on remotely if it's off?" Williams asked Snowden, referring to the "burner" smartphone Williams used for travel to Russia. "Can they turn on apps? Did anyone know or care that I Googled the final score of the Rangers-Canadiens game last night because I was traveling here?" > "I would say yes to all of those," Snowden replied. "They can absolutely turn them on with the power turned off to the device."
- pacala 8y agoAirplane mode + WiFi + Signal? Covers 95% of my daily routine. Home-Work-Home-Work-Home-Work-Home-Work-Home-Work-Weekend-Weekend.
- givinguflac 8y agoWhile I’d love to believe that’s enough, you can’t really be certain the SIM isn’t uploading Location data that’s been stored while in airplane mode. Until SIM is open source (which is pretty unlikely) there’s no way to be sure outside of a device not having a cellular radio or gps capability.
- Tehnix 8y agoWhy would it? The SIM card itself has no real functionality, and cannot just randomly affect the radio components of the phone. It just stores its identity and keys, so the cell tower can identify and bill the right user. The way the location tracking works is simply by logging what phone connected to the cell tower, at the tower itself. To be able to adjust the power the radio component needs to output (to get a good signal), it needs to know the distance to the tower. You get location by then correlating with multiple towers, because the phone has to choose which one it has the strongest reception to, and therefore has to gather data from all nearby towers. In short: that’s not how a SIM card works.
- theseatoms 8y agoUse a faraday bag.
- hedora 8y agoThat breaks wifi (though wifi is enough to leak decent location data, unless you’re using a vpn, and somehow blocking location service). I wonder how hard it is to open a modern iphone and cut the relevant antenna traces on the pcb.
- walterbell 8y agoThere are youtube videos on iDevice wifi modifications. You can also use a wired ethernet adapter on iOS devices via the lightning port.
- gruez 8y agoat that point, what's the point of using a phone?
- walterbell 8y agoThere are many offline apps/data which can be synced via wired ethernet, including maps, audio, music, video, photos, books, notes, sound/light meters, compass and special purpose add-on devices.
- reshie 8y agoexactly. i think the issue with cell with people is that it can track your movements and most people always have it on them and on.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoSurgery: No GPS antenna, no GPS location.
- dexter0 8y agoUse a "proxy" phone number that forwards to your cell phone number and keep your real cell phone number private.
- jasonkostempski 8y agoIt's not the number that's a problem, devices are tracked and the data is sold by the cell provider. Even if it's not billed under your name, it's likely moving between your house and your work 5 days a week, that's enough to deduce who it's used by.
- psergeant 8y agoThe solution is political, not technical.
- Qwertie 8y agoWhich is even harder because you have to convince the masses to care instead of just messing with some code to fix the problem for yourself
- marssaxman 8y agoThen there's no solution at all.
- uptown 8y agoFaraday bags work when you want devices offline - but it doesn’t make for a very useful device.