Of all the privacy violations of the world we live in, this is the biggest for me. I do NOT want people keeping tabs on where I am, where I am going, and where I have been. This shit is big.
If there is one thing that I miss about the ‘good old days’ (and I am elder millennial born in the early 80s) is that while there were security cameras in various places at the time it was a lot easier to be relatively anonymous with many interactions in the past.
I need to make it clear. Privacy and people obsessing about privacy isn’t new. I read old Sears-Roebuck catalogs from pre-WW1 and one guarantee that they have is that the packaging they will send you is super private: As in, only your address and name is on it for the post office to deliver it to you and nothing else. Plain brown paper wrapping and nothing indicating what could be inside. It could be something as simple as clothes or kitchenware or stationary, or something spicy like firearms and ammunition (and they sold handguns very freely in their catalogs prior to 1918) . People in the old days didn’t want people to know what books they were reading, or much of anything. Privacy was a big fucking deal.
What sort of device (and what internet provider) did you post this reply with because I’m afraid I might have some bad news
Not T-mobile.
Good, but there’s more to it than that. I’d argue the carrier is actually the least important part of this
The carrier is probably the most important part of this. One can choose to use a dumbphone with limited system services, hell, an IOT board with a speaker and a microphone attached. It is comparatively easy to silence local software.
However, one can not stop the cell carrier from gathering e911 “required” telemetry (GPS geolocation and cell site location ranging data) except to keep the modem turned off. (If one believes “off” is off.)
There used to be telecom regulations around privacy way back when, but those days are apparently long behind.
The carrier point is where they connect the persona to the person.
The Google/Apple account arguably does worse.
You can create a complete new Google account, using a burner phone paid in cash.
However, the PHONE is what is tracked, all the time, on the network.
You’re not wrong, just saying there’s a lot of data being stolen from most every device that most people use, regardless of carrier.
Guess it’s time to start selling the location of billionaires or is that already a thing?
Providing their location data is already a thing. Apparently they feel threatened by it.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-elonjet-flight-tracker-transparency/
That’s illegal in the US.
Or judges
The Carriers also argue that the Commission misinterpreted the Communications Act, miscalculated the penalties, and violated the Seventh Amendment by not affording them a jury trial.
You poor things! Were you forced into binding arbitration by a bullshit ToS? Besides, if nobody at a corporation ever goes to jail for these crimes, they sure as fuck don’t deserve a jury trial.
Once you have a bad verdict you have nothing to lose so just challenge the whole trial
I’m surprised that they would want one.
I doubt that they do. They are most likely clutching at straws trying to get the verdict overturned.
It’s a jury of their peers, so it would have to be 12 other telecom companies, right? I don’t think we have that many here. 🤔
If you count MVNOs I bet we do. And that definitely wouldn’t be a conflict of interest.
I’m not sure it the 7th ammendment would even apply as it’s intended for civil court only, not criminal
a fine of $92M and it isnt a class action suit. i dont even get my $1.08 in the mail for being violated.
Fines are criminal. Lawsuits are civil.
Fines are punishment for breaking the law, and are paid to the state. Civil lawsuits seek relief by those impacted by the defendant, and can range from monetary relief to injunction compelling the defendant to take or cease certain actions.
Outside of felonies, civil litigation is much worse than criminal. When the government goes after you criminally, they can fine you, jail you, or kill you, and that’s about it. When they go after you in civil court, they can do much worse.
I work in municipal government, and we frequently do both. For example, if you build a gate across a public street (happens more than you would think), we can’t just send you to criminal court, because once they’ve fined you, the case is over and there’s still a gate blocking the road.
Instead we send you to criminal court for the fine AND take you to civil court to get an injunction requiring you to remove the gate (or to put a lein on your property if we had it removed ourselves and you haven’t paid us back).
got it. so we are still being violated. D :
The government doesn’t have standing to sue in civil courts on your behalf, because they aren’t a party in the dispute.
If your neighbor backs their car into your fence, you settle it with the neighbor, possibly through the courts. The federal government doesn’t get involved.
The fundamental issue is that a cell service provider has a natural monopoly. There can never be many of them, so there isn’t going to be much competition.
It’s also a pain to switch identifiers — changing a phone number is painful — so a cell provider is in possession of a unique identifier linked to location spanning many years. That’s valuable data.
Both a SIM and the phone’s radio in which it is inserted have unique identifiers visible to a carrier.
If one gets prepaid service in cash, it’s possible to not directly link those identifiers to an identity.
You can probably get your phone service from an SIP provider, maybe route the SIP traffic and all other data service through a VPN. That’ll obscure most unique information from the cell provider, and the SIP provider won’t even have geolocatable IP information, just a VPN endpoint. The SIP and VPN market is competitive; no natural monopoly there.
It’s still probably possible to link a cell ID to identity if one can cross-reference enough databases that do contain one’s personal identity linked to a location at a given time. Maybe if one gets a sufficiently-cheap cell modem that it can be swapped along with the SIM at regular intervals, so that there’s only a year-long period or whatever over which over which a cell service provider has a unique identity. If the phone number is linked to the SIP provider instead of a cell provider, then the barriers to swapping cell service across accounts go away.
I suppose one has to deal with the risk that the firmware on the modem might phone home with location data.
And, of course, all bets are off if an app running on one’s computer or cell phone can just obtain a unique identifier and location at a given time and phone home with that and let the app vendor sell it.
In this article t least they’re only talking about the cell providers selling location information, and using a vpn wouldn’t help with that. You still need to connect to a cell provider, they still have a continuous detailed track of your location. While a vpn would help limit what they know about your online activity, it does not at all affect their ability to sell your location to a data broker.
And given the ubiquity and sneakiness of online tracking, I’m no longer convinced a vpn is effective at reducing knowledge of your activity. We need to think a little deeper about the threat: your cell provider seeing your activity is not the threat. The threat is every provider from cell to content dumping massive amounts of data including profiles and other pii with data brokers, so they can connect the dots and sell “better” data.
In this article t least they’re only talking about the cell providers selling location information, and using a vpn wouldn’t help with that. You still need to connect to a cell provider, they still have a continuous detailed track of your location.
Yes, but what I’m talking about in my comment is that there there doesn’t need to be an unbroken ID over a long period of time and they don’t need to have any direct link to your identity. They have an IMSI and an ICCD. They can link that to at least approximate location. But they don’t have to have data tying it directly to your identity, and that pair does not need to be linked to someone for many years, can be swapped out, even if most people do typically have that link today.
EDIT: And I’m not asserting that this is a hard guarantee that it’s impossible to link that to identity. I mention that it may well be possible to deanonymize that data by correlation through other databases. For example, let’s say that someone could correlate data from an airline’s flight data that is correlated with personal identity and a cell provider sells sufficient of their cell data to link location to air travel data. Two flights, if someone doesn’t leave their phone at a given location, is probably enough to deanonymize someone. ALPR data is probably another major way to harvest data that might be useful in cross-correlation with data like this, and at least in the US, there are no (national, dunno about state) laws against setting up an ALPR node wherever anyone who wants pleases. But it’s enough to ensure that a personal identity and the data that the cell provider has are not directly immediately linked.
In the US at least, porting (transferring) a number from one provider to another takes (usually) ~5 minutes. You can even do it to/from landlines. The carrier/customer service might balk and try to keep you but a little persistence and it’s done. It’s been this way years before I got my first phone number, and that was almost 20 years ago now.
Well…yes, but in that case, someone’s keeping a phone number, which uniquely identifies them and is most-likely even publicly tied to their identity (unless someone maintains multiple cell phones). Like, one cell provider may not have the data, but then multiple will, and if they’re both willing to sell information to a data broker…shrugs
In addition to that, unless you also swap out the hardware at the same time, there’s still the hardware identifiers spanning providers, and if someone has a plan, billing data spans providers and is accessible to the provider (though there may be legal restrictions by the state on cell providers on making use of personal billing data or merchant-account restrictions imposed by credit card vendors; not sure there).
Everything is legal if the only penalty is a fine.
Tired of the bullshit from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon. I’ve been thinking about Cape more and more every day.
(Yes, I understand that the radios used by Cape are licensed by the other carriers, but their privacy-focused infrastructure is what I’m really looking for.)
Should just be public. I think it’s clear now that private companies running utilities is awful. Reagan and Thatcher can roll in their graves while I piss on their neoliberalism and “public private partnerships”.
$99 per month?! How much money is T-Mobile making off selling location data? Their currently advertised prepaid plans run from $40-$60.
Seriously. Mint is owned by T-Mobile and plans start at $15/mo.
I’m happy to spend $3 a month for a privacy-respecting email account over a free Gmail, but $100 instead of $15 is a bit much.
Actually, they start at $15
My post paid tmo plan is $60/mo. Why tf is a prepaid $60 too? Maybe I’m out of touch, but prepaid used to be like the most bare bones plans available
You are, in fact, out of touch. Unless you need phone financing (which should be done through the phone manufacturer, not the carrier, to avoid lock-in) there is absolutely no reason for the typical person to be using a postpaid plan.
I recently moved from an AT&T Business plan (which was grandfathered) to the tune of $95 (but discounted from $125! what a deal) + tax + fees (and a laptop data plan for $20 + taxes + fees), that I had for true unlimited data and the absolute top priority level not found anywhere else from AT&T (unless you were a first responder using FirstNet), to Visible at $30 a month all-in (with $5 discount for 12 months). Verizon priority data, unlimited everything, prepaid. My folks are on the $15 tmo connect plan and have unl/unl/5GB of data (hard capped but they use around 1GB so no big concern). My second line is thru Tello at $6.
I used to be a big geek into this, and it pains me when people are like ‘I need the best plan’ and get absolutely taken to the cleaners when a) they rarely ‘need’ the best and b) the best is nearly always available for less.
You could be paying $25 less every month and get the exact same service. Or cut some corners and save $45.
there is absolutely no reason for the typical person to be using a postpaid plan.
I mean, I use prepaid-in-cash cell service. But I wouldn’t say that there’s zero reason. A plan is less payment hassle. And if you lose a phone that isn’t directly linked to your identity, any service on it that’s prepaid and tied to the phone is gone.
Huh? Every provider I’ve ever used offers auto-pay. Even going all the way back to my first carrier in 2009. When you switch phones (or lose it) you simply swap the sim card over (and order a new one if lost). You don’t lose the prepaid service…
I don’t see my plan on the tmo site, so I guess it’s grandfathered. I use about 80gb a month (often close to 100) and their highest tier pre-paid is the same price ($60/mo) and limits after 50gb.
Almost all tmo plans lose priority at 50GB; it’s been a while but I think only the top top tier gets 100GB.
But still, there are several options that gives 50GB+ (or real unlimited) for less, some even without leaving tmo itself (metro is the wholly-owned prepaid-only arm of tmo). Or the Visible (wholly-owned prepaid-only arm of Verizon) plan I mentioned. AT&T offers a plan at $50 with 22GB priority and unlimited thereafter, and they are the least noticeable when you lose priority. Cricket (AT&T arm) has offers now and then for $40 unlimited, and as I recall is real unlimited without deprioritization, though it’s been a bit.
There was Total Wireless (another Verizon arm) that offered unl everything for $15 price-locked in last summer, currently $25 afaik.
You’ve got options to save if you look around :)
Cape uses the US Cellular network, which was just acquired by T-Mobile this month. I wonder what will happen with this service. They may not let Cape continue with their own backend infrastructure.
