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Comment by trendia | Hacker News Reader

Nearly everyone has smartphones, even the most privacy-conscious people. Until we find an alternative to the current devices, which have a mic/camera/gps that could be turned on remotely, I don't think we will be able to combat the invasion of privacy

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The most privacy-conscious people really don't. Kaspersky Lab's CEO and his phone:

http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/6719/26720365.10e/0_a119d_872...

Too bad that phone also has an always on mic, and a network connection from where it can receive instructions.

But probably a removeable battery.

> even the most privacy-conscious people

No, we don't. Are you sure you know many "most privacy-conscious" people?

> I don't think we will be able to combat the invasion of privacy

That is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We won't be able to combat the invasion of privacy if everyone stops fighting.

It is not only technology which enables this new wave of mass surveillance, it is also that people believe the "if you don't do any bad ..." bs again. Our governments wouldn't stop their surveillance programs even if we would all stop using mobile phones and the internet.

It is just history repeating itself. People which did experience the last mass surveillance times are now a minority group.

you don't even need a phone to track people.

facial recognition tech, shitty surveillance cameras, and algorithms could likely be used in combination to tease out any persons exact location for a given time to a pretty high degree of accuracy.

Yeah but for the moment the government doesn't have a live feed to every surveillance camera and most are privately owned.

get a phone without GPS (yes there are such phones) and physically remove the microphone and use a wired headset.

It can still be triangulated from the phone towers.

Yes, you can also be tracked via CCTV, your payments, bioinformatics and general information, it's easy to build profiles for most people and knowing pretty much where they'll be and when.

What about using voip such as Google voice?

Still need internet connection, tracking a device over wireless is arguably just as easy, even if you rotate your mac addresses.

And much more precisely via wifi - the local mall offers its shop very specific information on shopper browsing habits this way.

why can't they triangulate your location by your cell signal (using a stingray, for example)?

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