Posts Tagged cell phone

Mobile Customer Locations Easily Accessible

From Motherboard:

Motherboard’s investigation shows just how exposed mobile networks and the data they generate are, leaving them open to surveillance by ordinary citizens, stalkers, and criminals, and comes as media and policy makers are paying more attention than ever to how location and other sensitive data is collected and sold. The investigation also shows that a wide variety of companies can access cell phone location data, and that the information trickles down from cell phone providers to a wide array of smaller players, who don’t necessarily have the correct safeguards in place to protect that data.

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Your Cell Phone Is Spying On You And It’s Great (or is it?)

From The CATO Institute:

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Primer for Protesters and “Anti-Government Extremists”

From EFF:

Cell Phone Guide For US Protesters, Updated 2014 Edition

With major protests in the news again, we decided it’s time to update our cell phone guide for protestors. A lot has changed since we last published this report in 2011, for better and for worse. On the one hand, we’ve learned more about the massive volume of law enforcement requests for cell phone—ranging from location information to actual content—and widespread use of dedicated cell phone surveillance technologies. On the other hand, strong Supreme Court opinions have eliminated any ambiguity about the unconstitutionality of warrantless searches of phones incident to arrest, and a growing national consensus says location data, too, is private.

Protesters want to be able to communicate, to document the protests, and to share photos and video with the world. So they’ll be carrying phones, and they’ll face a complex set of considerations about the privacy of the data those phones hold. We hope this guide can help answer some questions about how to best protect that data, and what rights protesters have in the face of police demands. Read the rest of this entry »

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Anonymity Impossible?

MIT asks the question in an article about how much information individuals create about themselves.

Much of this data is invisible to people and seems impersonal. But it’s not. What modern data science is finding is that nearly any type of data can be used, much like a fingerprint, to identify the person who created it: your choice of movies on Netflix, the location signals emitted by your cell phone, even your pattern of walking as recorded by a surveillance camera. In effect, the more data there is, the less any of it can be said to be private, since the richness of that data makes pinpointing people “algorithmically possible,” says Princeton University computer scientist Arvind Narayanan.

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Congressman Leaks – Government Spying on Our Phones

From Threat Level:

The carriers said they responded to police emergencies, subpoenas and other court orders. They did not clearly say how many times they responded to probable-cause warrants. That’s because much of Americans’ mobile-phone data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The reports showed that AT&T, the nation’s second largest carrier, received about 125,000 requests from the authorities in 2007 — mushrooming to more than 260,000 last year.

Verizon, the nation’s largest carrier… said it also received about 260,000 requests last year…

Sprint said it has received…500,000 requests last year.

…T-Mobile, declined to divulge how many requests it gets.

McCone said the company (AT&T) employs more than 100 full-time staffers and “operates on a 24/7 basis for the purpose of meeting law enforcement demands.”

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