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Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I’d just buy a $100 android phone and use it as my keypass whilst at uni. Don’t take it off-site with you - you’d have virtually unlimited freedom if you leave it in your room, or turn it completely off before leaving campus.

It is a straightforward response to a ridiculous request on user privacy: you can’t force me to use my personal phone how you’d like unless you provide it. You can force me to buy into an app that tracks the location of my device in order to enter buildings and such, but you can’t control which device I choose to use, nor force me to carry it in my personal life. The flaw in the underlying assertion (one-to-one phone/person relationship, location of a phone = location of a person) is not my problem.

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> you can’t force me to use my personal phone how you’d like unless you provide it. You can force me to buy into an app that tracks the location of my device in order to enter buildings and such, but you can’t control which device I choose to use, nor force me to carry it in my personal life.

While I appreciate what you're trying to say, and agree that it's draconian. The assertion that they can't force you isn't quite true. The collage is private property, they can absolutely make entry conditional on using this app on your personal device.

If you don't agree with their measures, then you simply aren't allowed on the colleges private property. Just as equally they can make compliance a condition of providing your education (it's a private contract after-all). Again, don't like it, don't get educated.

Ultimately college education is a contract between private individuals, none of the protection you have against government overreach apply.

Contracts are only enforceable (a) if they are conscionable, and (b) if they exist.

Is there a contract saying the user must carry the tracking app everywhere they go?

Probably not but there almost certainly is the standard set of "industry standard" clauses that inevitably end up in any sort of consumer contract, basically saying "we can kick you out for any reason we want, what are you going to do, all our competitors have the same language".

I eagerly await legal challenges for this.

> $100

You don't need to go nearly that high. Right now, Tracfone has a sale for a SIM-locked refurb Android 8.1 phone for literally $5, and even outside of sales the low end is only about $20.

I bought one as a balloon tracker the other year (I didn’t realize this was illegal).

As soon as you connect it to a network (including WiFi) it will automatically download gigabytes of malware from the play store which will keep launching in the background and crashing things by using up all the ram. It was pretty eye opening to realize what people actually deal with if they can’t afford nicer phones and don’t know how to (or can’t) replace the firmware. Cheap android phones make cheap PCs look nice.

Also an emulator or container is $0.

What's illegal about it? FAA regulations?

I found this.

https://www.highaltitudescience.com/pages/federal-communicat...

I remember being a uni student, and an extra $100 outlay (plus a sim presumably to keep it connected to a network) for privacy was definitely not something I would have had the budget for. I was a fairly typical student, but I don't think at any point in my 5 years of uni I would have been free to drop $100 on something like that. I was very cash flow restricted the entire time.

If you were cost conscious, you probably didn't pay for a $50K/yr tier-3 liberal arts degree then.

And as a US student (the sort who think Albion is a good investment) you'd have loans to cover your cash flow.

You can even use an android emulator for this - some of them come with location spoofing too.

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