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Comment by humbleMouse | Hacker News Reader

This is the beginning of the end. Privacy is gone, humanity is doomed. What other data will these devices skim while they are looking through the phone OS to see when the last text message you sent was?

We are on a slippery slope to being completely controlled by cops and their technology. Pretty soon every law enforcement vehicle is going to come equipped with a LTE spoofer running in their car that skims all this information from the phones in the near vicinity.

You'll get automatic messages in your car's dashboard display when you send a text message - "Pull over, you broke the law and sent a text while driving. A cop will be here soon to arrest you."

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On one hand, driving isn't a right and if you're piloting a 5k+ lb projectile at 70mph(or 50k+ in the case of some truckers I've seen texting + driving) you deserve to have the goddamn book thrown at you.

It would be nicer if there was a way to do this without complete privacy invasion, at the bare minimum a warrant + request to your carrier for just timestamp metadata would make me much more comfortable.

What if my passenger was making the call or text on my phone (which isn't uncommon, at least with my group of friends)?

What if the texts were minutes before at a parking lot, while the car was off? How does anything but a copy actually seeing a cell phone in my hand while driving prove beyond a doubt I'm guilty?

The (vast?) majority of cars on the road at any given time are single-occupant. For mobile phone offences, the proportion probably goes up for the reasons you cite.

E911 pings should provide moving speed at the time of the text. An officer is going to take your Driver's License, so they should should be able to differentiate between you and your passengers.

How accurate are E911 pings?

What if I give my phone to a passenger? My driver's license has literally nothing to do with that.

My wife and I both have expensive smart phones. We frequently let the passenger use the driver's phone for, e.g. navigational purposes. If we get in an accident while I'm driving and my wife is using my phone to configure a route, how is a cop to know that?

> E911 pings should provide moving speed at the time of the text.

Are E911 pings sent before you call 911?

> Modern Enhanced 911 emergency systems (E911) systems automatically track the locations of people who call 911. This technology saves lives, as it allows emergency services to know the precise locations of callers. Like most technology, E911 also has a sinister side. Using a tactic called E911 pings, police can make reverse 911 calls to determine the locations of any cell phone built after 1999

- https://21stcenturylocksmith.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/how-po...

seems to imply it only works when calling 911.

> An officer is going to take your Driver's License, so they should should be able to differentiate between you and your passengers.

They can really use my driver's license to differentiate between who was holding a phone a few minutes before? That's amazing!

Pretty sure E911 piggybacks on the periodic pings that happen to towers. You cell phone needs to periodically hit the tower to determine CDMA power for the code division to work correctly. Either way positional(and extrapolated from that, speed) data is available to carriers.

Fair point on who's holding the phone but I think there are certain cases where it can be determined. I'll full agree that any solution isn't perfect, however the stakes of someone driving distracted are high enough that I think it's at least worth trying to tackle it.

So your argument is "think of the children" followed by "let's ticket the person even if they handed off their phone to a passenger to text, or texted at the stop light (legal in my state)?"

And you'd be willing to normalize law enforcement snooping in our most private affairs for trivial traffic offenses?

Where didn't I mention children? :)

I've been run off the road, almost hit head-on and all sorts of other stupid shit that would have massive implications to my life and the life of my family from people texting + driving.

Hell, last month I got rear-ended by a state employee who was looking at her phone while stopped behind me and then struck my car during yield-merge.

Everyone has had incidents like thsi. I had a semi cross three lanes of traffic at once and almost kill my son and I on the interstate. He was on his phone. Held it up and waved apologetically as I passed him. Still not a valid reason to let law enforcement have trivial access to people's most personal information.

I guess it's true, in the sense that when you look at it, everything is the beginning of some end.

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