

Sprint fed customer GPS data to police over 8 million times - MikeCapone
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/12/sprint-fed-customer-gps-data-to-leos-over-8-million-times.ars

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jonmc12
Funny, when my phone was stolen sprint assured me that 'legally' they could
not use the GPS info from the phone for anything but emergency purposes - not
even to tell the police where my stolen phone might be.

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ars
It's not 8 million people.

Each court order lasts for 60 days, for a ping every 3 minutes, which is 28800
per order.

So the 8 million could actually be as low as 278 orders.

~~~
asciilifeform
Or a "time" could be the setting of the "start bit" on a single phone.

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nym
It's a shame the general public doesn't care about privacy. Even techies use
AT&T despite their involvement with the NSA's secret spy program.

[ source: [http://news.cnet.com/AT38T-sued-over-NSA-spy-
program/2100-10...](http://news.cnet.com/AT38T-sued-over-NSA-spy-
program/2100-1028_3-6033501.html) ]

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abstractbill
I don't care about privacy in general. I _do_ care about asymmetry of privacy.
Although it would be a radically different world to the one we currently live
in, I think I would actually be quite ok with the idea of _everyone_ having
access to the GPS data, all the time.

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redcap
So you can know that the family down the street is on holidays (in
Wallyworld!) and you can now rob their house?

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cf
But wouldn't they also know when someone that didn't know was in the house?

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FreeRadical
only if they monitored it from their holiday location

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marze
The real question isn't if 8 million times is too many, but if one time with
out the approval of a judge is too many.

If it is important for law enforcement to have the information, they should
get the OK of a judge, to prevent abuse.

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asciilifeform
Everyone is talking about court orders and legalities, and no one is
questioning the basic absurdity of one's own bought-and-paid-for hardware
acting as a stool pigeon. Required reading:
<http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html>

~~~
Psyonic
A good read... I'll be thinking about that one for awhile.

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patrickgzill
I believe that this kind of thing is why Congress, the courts, and regulators
do not break up certain industries even when there is clear cartel or
monopolistic behavior.

It is just so much easier to control an industry sector when there are just a
few large players.

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oiuygfhjnm
That's why there has to be warrantless wiretaps. Can you imagine the paperwork
of having to fill out a warrant for these 8million pre-criminals, it would
cause terrible writers cramp.

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nkassis
So... cops don't have the capability for a simple bash script and phone lists?

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mrkurt
Sprint has a sort-of response to this article:
[http://community.sprint.com/baw/community/sprintblogs/buzz-b...](http://community.sprint.com/baw/community/sprintblogs/buzz-
by-sprint/announcements/blog/2009/12/01/sharing-location-information)

It doesn't really say much, though, other than attempting to clarify what "8
million times" means. I don't know about anyone else, but that portion didn't
really require much clarification.

Someone from the ACLU posted a comment on their response which asks for more
specific information.

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joeyh
The speculation I'm seeing elsewhere is that this was 8 million pings sent by
a much smaller number of survielled phones, with each sending pings every 30
minutes or whatever.

Anyway, the original blog post has much other interesting info, despite the
probably inflated numbers in its title.
<[http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-
re...](http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-real-
surveillance.html>);

~~~
tedunangst
Exactly, though the 8 million is not pings from phones but rather requests
from police. Maybe the police are different, but when I use a web app to get
live data, I tend to click refresh quite a bit.

