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Hello, article author here. I wrote the article to notify an audience a little bit broader than Hacker News. There are many people who seem to think that it's
by gjsman-1000 4y ago
Hello, article author here.
I wrote the article to notify an audience a little bit broader than Hacker News. There are many people who seem to think that it's only Google or Apple or Facebook they need to worry about; or that if they get GrapheneOS they are now really-secure and really-private (which they are, from Google, but not really overall). The very idea that their cellphone carrier may have their location, even without their phone cooperating, is often a foreign idea they never thought of.
This is, of course, a very long rabbit trail that never ends. Your license plate could get scanned. You could get picked up on cameras and run through facial recognition. But it's still important to call out areas that people may not have considered. Imagine a journalist - if nobody calls this out because "everyone knows," she might have installed GrapheneOS, signed up for ProtonMail, paid with cash for a SIM card, and gone off to cover some story without realizing this blind spot.
> I think everybody knows that if it's important not to be tracked by law enforcement (e.g. attending an illegal protest), you don't take your phone in the first place.
My home state would not have almost every police department armed to the teeth with IMSI Catchers if everybody just knew they weren't supposed to do that.
- megablast 4y ago[flagged]
- WheatMillington 4y agoHow is this a click bait title? Hacker News commenters often have a bad perspective on how non-tech people ought to see the world, and this is a great example. I'm not in tech, so I find it entirely reasonable to expect that if my phone has a "location tracking off" switch, it will disable location tracking. I honestly can't comprehend why you think this isn't a reasonable point of view.
- dendriti 4y agoThere's been a bizarre shift in discourse about privacy in the last 15 years. When most of these posters were young, they actually cared about keeping their personal information private. The idea that you would carry around a device with a location tracker that could only be turned off by deactivating the device, would have been horrifying. Now, at least on HN, these same people are saying This is Fine. Maybe their companies depend on exploiting the ignorant.
- nequo 4y agoCell phones 15 years ago still leaked location information via the cell tower they connected to, didn’t they? This doesn’t seem like a development from the past 15 years like you’re saying. So if you were privacy conscious to that extent 15 years ago, you didn’t carry a cell phone. That didn’t change.
- UncleMeat 4y agoI think a very important question is "what would you prefer this switch to say"?