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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

Forget about all the app and OS, maybe they're clean and maybe not.

There's also the cell layer, which constantly negotiates with cell towers for sector and power as normal idling. So they know your location at least to tower (CGI), sector and delay (CGITA) and sometimes trilaterated (UTDOA) from ~1000m down to 10m accuracy. The towers' base station controllers need to keep logs anyway, so the cell company has records of your rough location.

Then there's bluetooth, wifi, audio beacons, optical, magnetic and inertial nav, all emitting or recieving you move through the world. None of this requires GPS, some requires app participation, some doesn't.

All phones are location and surveillance devices. Leave it home if you're serious.

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The positive side to tracking and a cell layer anecdote - cell layer forensics are often utilized in search and rescue contexts. I have seen this data accessed (through legal procedure in the US) and utilized to save lives of the missing and to provide closure to the families/friends of the missing.

On the flipside e.g. in Germany this has been used to track down creators of illegal graffiti, using a law that is intended for terrorism and other heavy crimes. We can allow search and rescue missions without having to also accept abuse of power.

Can you reference anywhere where that happened because I've never heard of that and would expect huge pushback in Europe in general..

> would expect huge pushback in Europe in general..

In general those things are not made public so that you don't have pushbacks.

I think I found the talk I got most of the info from [0]. The interesting parts about the law and how it was abused start roughly at 25:03, though unfortunately it's only available in German (Edit: turns out it actually does have an English audio track).

A very short summary: the law is only supposed to be used for very severe crimes and only if the investigation would otherwise be significantly more difficult or impossible. Also the owners of the tracked phones have to be notified of the tracking as it is a violation of the person's rights. In reality (at the date of the talk) it had never been used for terrorism, about 5% of the time for crimes like murder and in over 70% of the time for theft (including a case of stolen empty beer barrels), and nobody was ever notified.

[0] https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9972-funkzellenabfrage_die_allta...

Thank you, those stats of the usage seem fine on paper, maybe worse than they should be, I'm still waiting to see what parent was talking about when he inferred abuse..

Europe does need a security authority, that doesn't depend on slow bureaucracy.

All this and the parent comment means is that any tool that is useful, is equally useful for good or bad. It is yet another example showing how it's wrong to address something bad by attacking the tool used to do it.

And when the SIM card will be gone, isn’t it gone already in USA for iPhones, you won’t even have the ability to remove that SIM. And you can be tracked all the time. Because we are already there - your phone is switched of but not really switched off.

My understanding is that modern phones still connect to cell towers without a SIM card in the device to allow for emergency calls.

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