

That’s No Phone. That’s My Tracker. - wallflower
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/thats-not-my-phone-its-my-tracker.html?_r=1&hp

======
comex
Subjecting a real problem to faintly ridiculous exaggeration and paranoia does
not help. (I'm not sure whether to be surprised this made it into the New York
Times or not.)

> Thanks to the explosion of GPS technology and smartphone apps, these devices
> are also taking note of what we buy, where and when we buy it, how much
> money we have in the bank, whom we text and e-mail, what Web sites we visit,
> how and where we travel, what time we go to sleep and wake up — and more.
> Much of that data is shared with companies that use it to offer us services
> they think we want.

I have never heard of purchase history, bank balance, alarm clock settings
(??? perhaps it refers to carriers supposedly tracking waking hours based on
usage? that would make more sense, but is no different from dumb phones), or
website history being tracked by anyone through a smartphone. "Whom we text"
is tracked, but "whom we email" is worth highlighting as an item that _cannot_
be tracked by a carrier without installing malware onto your phone, assuming
you use encrypted email. (The credit card company is tracking your purchases,
and email providers may be tracking your email, depending on privacy policy,
whether you're using a smartphone or not, but that's irrelevant. I guess if
you count Gmail's algorithms reading email to offer services "they think we
want"... I don't.)

> Scholars have called them minicomputers and robots. Everyone is struggling
> to find the right tag, because “cellphone” and “smartphone” are inadequate.

That "phone" doesn't adequately describe modern smartphones is a valid point,
but has literally nothing to do with tracking.

> Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, argues that they are
> robots for which we — the proud owners — are merely the hands and feet.
> “They see everything, they’re aware of our position, our relationship to
> other human beings and other robots, they mediate an information stream
> around us,” he has said.

Colorful, but ridiculously vague. There are many different types of
information and they are all stored differently. With the possible exception
of Facebook, there is no entity that sits up high reading all your stuff
without a court order, and if you want to have completely secure conversations
through email or other means it's easy to do so.

> A recent survey by O2, a British cell carrier, showed that making calls is
> the fifth-most-popular activity for smartphones; more popular uses are Web
> browsing, checking social networks, playing games and listening to music.
> Smartphones are taking over the functions that laptops, cameras, credit
> cards and watches once performed for us.

Also irrelevant to tracking.

> Turning it off when you’re not using it will also help, because it will
> cease pinging your location to the cell company, but are you really going to
> do that? Shutting it down does not even guarantee it’s off — malware can
> keep it on without your realizing it. The only way to be sure is to take out
> the battery. Guess what? If you have an iPhone, you will need a tiny
> screwdriver to remove the back cover. Doing that will void your warranty.

If you are really concerned about malware preventing you from turning off your
iPhone, you can hold down the home and power buttons to turn it off without
going through software.

> “Don’t have a cellphone or just accept that you’re living in the
> Panopticon.”

A third alternative is to wear a tinfoil hat which will stop all the
tracking???

> There is another option. People could call them trackers.

Okay but if hackers start hijacking peoples' sessions can we start calling
them tracker-jackers?

Edit: Or more to the point - this is like calling all passerby "government
agents" because they can be required to testify in court.

------
_delirium
I've been not carrying a phone with me lately, not because of tracking fears,
but out of a sort of experiment to see if I _really_ need to be connected in
the relatively short distances between my laptop having a wifi connection
(which it has at home, at the office, in coffee shops, on trains, etc.). I
suppose avoiding this dragnet is a nice bonus, but I wonder how long it'll be
until not carrying a phone gets registered as somehow suspicious in itself.

~~~
aashay
What are your plans in case of emergencies?

~~~
grecy
At what point did that question become relevant to _every_ facet of life?

I honestly can't believe it when people ask that question. It's such a scare
tactic.

~~~
aashay
FWIW my question wasn't meant to be a scare tactic. I genuinely wanted to know
what the plan was in case of emergencies. I suppose I could have (and should
have, since HN seems to value explicitness and literalism) elaborated to avoid
assumption and/or presumption.

~~~
acabal
Don't buy in to the fear mentality that's strangling American discourse.
People were dealing with emergencies just fine without cell phones... just _15
years ago_.

------
ChuckMcM
I'm surprised no one has mentioned putting the phone in a foil pouch. As
'antenna-gate' demonstrated it doesn't take a whole lot to make a phone unable
to connect, with a conductive foil pouch you can put your phone in it and no
matter what it is not sending out any info about you, but you can easily pull
it out and use it.

The other thing they don't mention is disinformation. Phones do _not_ use the
encrypted GPS channel, they use the regular one. And spoofing it can make you
phone think it is somewhere that it isn't. Cell tower data screws with that
(since if you cross correlate to cell tower pings you end up with conflicting
data sets) but within the range of a tower its eminently doable. The recent
'drone hijack' example had an idea of how much it costs ($1K) to build a
reasonably high powered GPS spoofer, to spoof the phone in your pocket would
take a very small one (and no sense screwing up your neighbors phone right?).

All we need are a couple of cases where the cell phone data "proves" you
weren't in the area of a crime and blam!

~~~
darklajid
So, I don't know a lot about the internal workings of these phones, but I was
under the impression that a phone manages its transmit power depending on the
signal strength.

IF that's the case: Wouldn't your solution turn the device into a pocket
heater that dies a couple of hours early?

What is the benefit of this 'clever' solution, if all you really want seems to
be to turn it off..?

~~~
mcpherrinm
Phones generally "give up" if they have basically no power. I spend
significant chunks of time in rural areas with no service, and battery life
isn't ever a problem.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Well, there is another option: Have an open software and hardware phone that
you know what it does and how it does it when you want it.

Eventually it will happen.

~~~
aes256
That's not really the point.

Having total control over your own phone doesn't resolve the more fundamental
problem that, in order to do basic tasks such as make calls or send text
messages, you are dependent on a cell phone provier who then, through ordinary
usage, is able to collect a terrifying amount of data about you.

They can triangulate your location whenever your phone is on and connected to
their network (24/7 for most people), and have a full record of your calls,
text messages, as well as all the data you send through their network.

------
niels_olson
In network parlance, isn't a general processor a "node"?

~~~
bloody_pretzels
Node is a really nice word for what the article describes.

The word "tracker" doesn't roll off the tongue very well and I think it
suffers from the same flaw that the article criticizes about "phone", namely
that it focuses on a specific aspect of a multi-purpose device. Node seems a
much better choice since it connotes all the important aspects of a smart
phone:

    
    
      - Connection to a network for the purpose of information sharing
      - Being identifiable and addressable
      - Processing capabilities
    

If we choose to find a more suitable name, I'd suggest maybe "Personal Node"
or "Smart Node".

~~~
bigiain
I think the problem is they're not a "personal node", they're nodes working
for Apple or Google or your telco. The idea of "node-ness" carries
connotations (at least to me) of being more useful as part of a network than
as individual devices - and that's way more true for the people/organisations
with access to data from the whole network of nodes, than the owner/operator
of a singe node.

I wonder if Google are collecting geo-spacial data about your social graph? I
suspect they could, if they wanted to, work out which section of your online
social network are people you meet in real life, and which are people you only
interact with on-line?

~~~
bloody_pretzels
If I didn't misunderstand, you're suggesting that "node" carries the idea of
being an autonomous entity that connects to a neutral network (i.e. no node is
more privileged than any other). In that case a more accurate term might be
"slave node" as opposed to the master nodes operated by carriers which control
and monitor the communication flow. But I think that's a subjective view. The
internet also has privileged nodes which could be used to monitor and control
the network or individual nodes.

"Tracker" simply ignores all the service aspects of the device and focuses on
a single use for one of the parties involved (costumer, carrier,
manufacturer). In that respects it is just as misleading a term as "phone".

------
lurker14
The Times is On It! <https://twitter.com/NYTOnIt>

