- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Privacy advocates got access to Locate X, a phone tracking tool which multiple U.S. agencies have bought access to, and showed me and other journalists exactly what it was capable of. Tracking a phone from one state to another to an abortion clinic. Multiple places of worship. A school. Following a likely juror to a residence. And all of this tracking is possible without a warrant, and instead just a few clicks of a mouse.
a device that constantly connects to antennas all over the place, is used to track your location.
who would have thought?
if you dont wanna get tracked - dont bring your phone.
Wouldn’t just keeping your phone in a metal box prevent it from communicating with anything? Keep your phone in a metal box and only take it out when you need it. Only take it out in a location that isn’t sensitive. Or hell, just make a little sleeve out of aluminum foil. Literally just wrapping your phone in aluminum foil should prevent it from connecting to anything. A tinfoil hat won’t serve as an effective Faraday cage for your brain, but fully wrapping your phone in aluminum foil should do the job. Even better, as it’s a phone, such a foil sleeve should be quite testable. Build it, put your phone in it, and try texting and calling it. If surrounded fully by a conductive material, the phone should be completely incapable of sending or receiving signals.
You could also just turn it off.
You sure it’s still not phoning home? How do you know “off” is really “off” anymore with a modern phone? It’s not like an old flip phone that you can just pop the battery out. Sure it sounds paranoid, but we’re literally talking about something that used to be the realm of crackpots and cranks - “the government is tracking all of us 24/7!” Well, it seems that’s actually literally the case now.
Meanwhile when I turn off Bluetooth on my iPhone it says “for the next y hours” and there’s no option to turn it off permanently.
Did you actually try looking this up. Turn it off in settings and it’s off forever until you turn it back on.
Don’t buy Apple?
Yeah, IOS and stock android are not acceptable if you care about this stuff
On graphene my bluetooth and wifi turn themselves OFF if I haven’t been connected for a few minutes
Or, you know, let the gov work for you, not against you, & fully expect people to get jailed if they track you.
It’s a matter of perspective what the minimum standard should be.
Especially when a personal device like a phone is basically necessary for a normal life and even public services.
Is a phone a basic necess[ity] for a normal life?
You can answer this yourself. Get rid of your phone and see. If you beleive it’s not a necessity, don’t say “yeah I could do these alternative things to get by”. Actually do it. I hope you’re not job-shopping
Yes, the impact on quality of life is just so significant that it’s a handicap to normal daily lives.
The above being a rhetorical question, I just wanted to take a temperature of the room.
I have lived without a phone pretty much all my adult life. The experiment for me would be to get a phone and see what changes. In that way, I have answered it for myself and the answer is a clear “you don’t need a phone”.
Considering nearly everything requires a phone number and also rejects VoIP numbers? Yes. A phone is required now to participate in society.
You and I must live in two different societies then. I work with at least two other individuals who also don’t have a cell phone (not just smart phone, but any cellular device), one of whom is also a millennial. My SIP number has never had any issues with online service auth.
We absolutely do the society I live in even the homeless have cell phones and I haven’t ran into anyone without one in decades
To be fair, I don’t go around in public telling everyone “I don’t have a cell phone btw”. So I suppose we are easy to miss.
Yes Boomer
I’m almost 50 myself, come on
Millennial, actually
Press X to doubt
A millennial not having a cell phone is such an unimaginable concept?
For whatever it’s worth, I do use SIP software telephony in order to make calls and receive texts, so in that way I do technically have a “phone”. But what I’m fundamentally rejecting here is the notion that I must be compelled to carry around a device in my pocket infested with proprietary malware.
Unfortunately yes, and I would go even a step further and say a smart phone is a basic necessity. More and more companies and even government services are operating on the assumption that everyone has a smart phone. I have encountered various services where if a person didn’t have a smart phone they literally can’t use it. I even have personal experience with it.
My landlord uses a company for payments that can only be interacted with via an app on a smart phone. There is no web portal option. There is no option to mail a check. There is no option to setup a direct bank transfer. I was essentially strong armed into it since the place itself was (and still is) better than almost anything else I saw and is a reasonable price.
Android virtual machine? Waydroid?
Are we talking about me specifically or people in general? I’ll assume general as I was just relaying a personal anecdote to show that my point/thesis wasn’t just a hypothetical as I do know how to get around it in my specific case.
In the general context, that’s not a great solution for most people as it is beyond their skill or time set. For the most disadvantaged people just having the ability to have a phone at all and a place to reliably charge it is an issue. There is also the issue is practicality. When I take public transit where I live, the app pulls up a QR code on my phone they gets scanned. I’m not even sure I could fit my laptop screen into the space to scan the QR code if I was emulating Android.
So I guess my thesis here is that systems should be made more accessible and inclusive rather than requiring those in the minority to either have to put more effort in using a workaround to reach functional parity or end up left out all together.
For example, some of these services would be… ?
Gov agencies require 2 factor to a cell phone. Land lines dont work and VoIP lines with texting also don’t work. The only option is to use snail mail and have sensitive data sent via post office
If I were stuck in that position, then I would not hesitate to choose the postage method. That being an option does not comport with the assertion “if a person didn’t have a smart phone they literally can’t use it”.
I respect your stubbornness in that regard, but understand that in such a situation you’re putting yourself in a position of significant friction, possibly costing yourself income, promotions etc.
I learned very quickly by playing the game by the unofficial rules and expectations things are way easier and my quality of life is much improved. Stubbornness won’t change the system, but it will certainly annoy people and slow down your access to life, liberty and the persuit of happiness. If that’s a trade off you’re willing to make so be it, but personally I’d rather enjoy my life than die on hills that very few people so much as glance at.
If you don’t want to be tracked illegally, don’t bring your phone.
If you don’t want any to be tracked legally, write/call/tweet/visit your representatives.
Also just write your Supreme Court and ask them how this isn’t a flagrant violation of the intent of the fourth amendment. Seriously the founding fathers would be asking what the fuck about this. They weren’t good people but they would’ve been privacy nuts.
The US Supreme Court has had an antagonistic relationship to the forth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States since before I was a kid in the 1970s since they often interfered with efforts to round up nonwhites. But after the 9/11 attacks and the PATRIOT ACT, SCOTUS has been shredding both amendments with carve-out exceptions.
Then Law Enforcement uses tech without revealing it in court, often lying ( parallel reconstruction ) to conceal questionable use, and the courts give them the benefit of the doubt.