Despite promises, cell carriers are still selling your real-time location data

The current situation in Germany is actually like this. Some kid doxxed a lot of politicians, musicians and jounalists and they found him within a week and now we suddenly have a discussion about data theft. It's insane.

edit: eg see here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46793116 The kid was annoyed by some politician's statements. I had hoped he was aiming for this effect, but maybe not.

The U.S. has some privacy laws, but at the same time, the U.S. (along with Canada) also obligates carriers to gather and store location data. A law saying they can not sell that is not a major step, it just takes an act of congress, and if the whiners and complainers would get off their ass and actually select their congresspeople based on policy, they might get things like this. For the time being a couple percent of the electorate selects your house member because almost nobody else even knows that a race is under way.

Hyperbole "The U.S. has no...", and tribal bashing "especially Republicans", is probably part of why the handful of people who have even heard their chosen congressperson speak, still choose based on tribe.

I think there's a distinction to be made with respect to "needing" a user's data in order to be able to provide service at all (for example, a user's age as you cannot permit them to use your application if they're under 13) vs. user data that makes it easier to provide the service, or in your example, advertise your service, to users. If your users are telling you they don't want to give you that data perhaps you should consider listening to them.

Hello,

One thought for you, do you actually plainly spell that out anywhere? I just visited the page and I could not find anything about a privacy policy.

One privacy policy I stumbled upon recently was this one: https://www.roguefitness.com/privacy-policy

They plainly spelled out what data they use, how they gather it, plainly said they do not sell the data and a very easy way to opt-out. That made me feel much better about doing business with them and creating an account with them versus a very legalize and obscure way of spelling it out.

I have a feeling you get people who complain is because the assumption is that the software tracks everything and it gets sold to anyone.

The acceptance of monitoring has always been a tacit choice made from ignorance, resulting from deliberate misdirection and subterfuge on the part of marketing organizations.

Your notion that the rejection of monitoring is a conditioned generational characteristic is delusional. In fact, anything less is completely anomalous within the context of all human history.

Good products will find a way to succeed regardless.

It might sound silly, but there is a delicious warm feeling that comes with waking up and having no internet available. The day feels less harried, more focused, and just calmer. The boon of increased productivity in every direction also feels incredible.

> The easiest method is fixing the phone OS. There is no need to depend on Google or Apple services for anything.

Location tracking happens at the baseband level, sometimes even without cooperation from your phone. Whatever you have running in the application processor, your carrier is legally obligated to at least try to ascertain your location.

Can't the carrier still reveal what cell tower you're nearest? It seems that no solution for this problem is possible without federal regulation followed by BIG fines for violations.

Maybe a few dozen kids need to be abducted before anyone will care. But frankly, after ignoring Sandy Hook, I no longer see Washington as a force for good of any kind.

One example was hands free laws. That was supposed to happen in 96/97. Our lobbyists kicked that can down the road quite a long ways. I had a major project queued up in PoC phase with an AI that listened in the background to everything you said. You could tell her to conference in someone, call someone, hang up the call, etc.. This was before "smart" phones. It was the same software used by the gov. to monitor calls for key phrases. No training required, she could understand any language, accent and context. Really cool software actually.

Another incident was around someone that broke the GSM encryption algorithms and was going to go public. My boss and a federal official met with them and explained what prison they would disappear into and for how long. Such things were postponed until long after the internet had grown and disclosures became more common. Nowadays people know that the GSM algo's have been broken for some time.

Another one was a spammer that managed to get his own SS7 signaling link and was spamming phones with text messages. I suggested dropping his link and I was told to let it go, since he was paying for the link... There are no laws against spamming mobile devices because they are not landlines. The laws around unsolicited advertisements only applies to landlines and fax machines. As I am sure you all know, having your own SS7 link means you can spoof the caller ID, do caller-id blocking override, drop callers on congested cell sites and much more. This is why 2FA on cell phones is less effective.

This one isn't so much about laws but rather ethics, and phone theft. From day one, we had the ability to brick any GSM phone over the air. We chose not to do this however, as customer support could accidentally brick the wrong phones. As you know, this led to phone theft being very profitable. That was the very thing that GSM bricking was supposed to stop, but we were just not willing to do it. There were no laws requiring us to use our capabilities to remove incentive to steal phones. There was discussion of making laws to require this, but we blocked all discussion from happening.

Some of the other issues I can think of would be rather risky to post here, despite being well after the statute of limitations, as they could cause embarrassment for certain agencies and could risk HN getting censored.

Doing the right thing takes work, effort, time, and money.

Agree to this contract and I'll tell you.

A buildout of a nationwide cellular network is almost tailor-made for the amount of cash they have in the bank, and almost the entirety of their would-be competition is universally hated. Seems like a no-brainer to me, and unlike other things they could spend their money on, a cellular network could always be sold off if needed. Not true for investment in A.I./self-driving cars/marketing/failed products/etc.

They could just buy a carrier, along with their frequencies. You may be right re: anti-monopoly laws.

E911 is the data set. It's just the triangulation data from the cell towers. There's also GPS data which is more accurate but the carrier doesn't get that data but apps can get it.

With notable exceptions, today's political campaigns are often financed by wealthy individuals and companies. The type of politicians which receive contributions are, unsurprisingly, the type whose views best align with those individuals and companies. This funding is instrumental in lifting many of these politicians into office. When a question of political control or regulation of companies arises, it is also unsurprising that these politicians often see things from a certain perspective.

The Republican Party’s official position is that business should be as unregulated as possible [1]. So we shouldn’t expect to see any regulatory action under Republican administrations.

Obama focused on blocking mergers among companies with products that they charged consumers for. It looks mainly like the precedent of consumer harm is undefined when the products are free to start with, and no one has gone back to try to patch the hole.

[1] https://gop.com/platform/restoring-the-american-dream/

Dozens of politicians are elected over and over. Richard Byrd from Virginia retired from the Senate in 2010 after 51 years. That's the current "record".

It's similar in the House. John Conyers just stepped down due to scandal after 52 years.

IMO, that there are no term limits is absurd. Thomas Jefferson got it:

https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-jeffers...

As we've improved our understanding of the human brain through neuroscience, and how can see that ideals will get lodged in people's brains and not change, having people serve that long just leads to stagnant idealism controlling politics.

We’re in a decades long reaction to government regulation that pervades the west. The government used to tell airlines and trucking companies what routes they could sell and what prices they could charge. That level of government regulation proved to be such a disaster, that everybody abandoned it starting in the 1980s. As a result, you have an entire generation of administrators, on both sides of the aisle, who grew up with an extreme aversion to government intervention.

Out of curiosity, how do they force arbitration? Do companies have military personnel they send to threaten those who want to sue them?

No it doesn't. Self-regulation is often motivated by 1) collective action problems where coordination benefits every company in a way that individual action wouldn't or 2) to ward off govt regulation by showing the govt that you can behave, as an industry.

Neither of these require anything but self-interest and the profit motive from the involved parties.

Things like the MPAA rating system seem to work, even though it is against the financial interests of studios.

One reason to be more concerned about privacy in a nationalized communication network is because it removes a middle man - one who cares at least a little about PR backlash - from the current system. In a nationalized system, there is likely much less friction for a bureaucrat to block entire classes of content than there is today (where they need to deal with a handful of companies whose goal is to make money rather than silence dissident opinion).

> If you're concerned with a drop in innovation, don't be - we're already far behind most of the rest of the developed world.

Not convinced by that - mobile telephony is pretty equal in technological innovation across most of the developed world (LTE rolled out, VoLTE rolled out by most carriers, 5G in planning), and handsets are pretty much the same for all markets.

I am much more worried about the government spying for my phone than about corporations spying for my phone. All that corporations want is money.

That isn’t how this data is obtained though. It’s all known on the carrier side. It does not rely on your phone submitting it.

The data they're selling is coming from signal triangulation, it's not coming from software implanted on your phone.

Mobile will become as essential as internet in general has become to participate in larger society.

I see it starting at the bottom. Tired of being tracked and trapped inside class barriers, the homeless and destitute will be the first to adopt extreme privacy-oriented protocols such as regularly cycling burner phones, using mobile VPNs, stripped-out GPS modules, and anonymous software such as Signal but which don't rely on phone numbers as identifiers. The poor will stop using phone numbers altogether. Perhaps charity services will exist which help aid this transition.

It will also start from the top, as we already see high-level CEOs using encrypted messaging and privacy-oriented protocols. They will see the obvious need for such services.

The overwhelming majority, the middle class, will be the last to adopt such practices and take back control of their privacy.