Satellites were locking in on cell phones owned by members of the nondenominational Protestant church in San Jose, California. Their location eventually worked its way to a private company, which then sold the information to the government of Santa Clara County. This data, along with observations from enforcement officers on the ground, was used to levy heavy fines against the church for violating COVID-19 restrictions regarding public gatherings.
Talk about Orwellian.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this, Wirecutter. I will turn my location off, and use it only for when I use my GPS, to map a route someplace.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it works that way. The govt isn't pinging your cellphone, its just picking up information from the ISP on where your cellphone is at any given moment. Remember the "emergency beep" last month? Even if your phone was off, you heard the beep.
DeleteYou need a "faraday box".
They can still track you. You're better off leaving it at home, taking the battery out, or just get a dumb phone instead.
Delete-lg
Makes no difference.....
DeletePigpen51
DeleteThey use the connections to the cell towers to track you.... The reason your phone rings and you can talk on it because of what is known as hand shaking. As your phone moves around it is talking to the cell towers in range telling them where you are.... This is why you can call and receive calls pretty much anywhere you are.... It is a necessity evil to have a cellphone... Leaving it home or removing the battery, if you can, is the only way around this
JD
I get along just fine without a cell phone myself. I've got an old flip phone for the truck in case I break down, but it's a rare occasion when I actually take it with me. I don't think I've turned it on in months.
DeleteIt does no good at home because I have no cell reception out here.
What no one is mentioning is that ads are used to track you. Each ad sent to your phone has a timestamp and location. It then harvests information specific to your phone. This is the data that gets sold.
DeleteGet a good VPN.
Pigpen,
DeleteShould airplane mode wirk as well? It should stop.your phone talking to outside sources.
Removing the battery or leaving at home best optiobs
Exile1981
Wirecutter
DeleteI worded that incorrectly, brain saying one thing and fingers typing something else, it should have read it is the necessity evil when having a cellphone
Anonymous @ 2:27
Ads don't matter when it comes to geofencing. It's your phone communication with the towers in the area so you can receive and make calls that give your location, approximate, that is recorded by the carrier
JD
I'm a computer guy, have written apps for phones, and from what I know:
DeleteThere's several ways your phone location is tracked.
1. Cellphone towers MUST track which "cell" (an area serviced by a particular antenna on the tower) your phone is in, in order to provide service. Unless your phone is in airplane mode or off, this WILL be reported and recorded. This isn't usually what's requested with geofence warrants, though it can be. This location is very approximate, though it's strengthened somewhat by recording ping times (approximate distance from the cell tower in light-milliseconds.)
2. Android phones (and probably apple to, though I'm less familiar with their features) track GPS location, which is MUCH more accurate and detailed. This is continuously reported to Google, where this is recorded. You can review this information, and delete it, if you want, in your Google account online.
*This* is what's (usually) reported to law enforcement via the geofence warrant, which is served to Google/Apple. It's turned off if you turn off location (which is why recent version of android make this more difficult to do, and popup multiple confirmations) turning it off will do the same thing as putting it into airplane mode: Nothing gets sent, so nothing is recorded.
This is also what's reported with ads, if you're browsing the internet or using an app with ads. But that doesn't matter, as it's already being continuously recorded by Google.
Takeaway:
Turning off your phone is complete protection from geofence warrants.
Turning off location is (mostly) protection from geofence warrants.
Note that if you're already a "person of interest" and your phone therefore has an NSA approved rootkit with location tracking and reporting, NONE of this applies. In that case, your only surety is remove the battery, or put it in a farraday cage. Usually, such rootkits are most conveniently detected via sudden changes in the battery life of your phone. I.E. if the day after your cousin is arrested, your phone suddenly goes flat in one day instead of two, be very suspicious. (Yes, I know someone who had that experience.)
Such rootkits are currently fairly uncommon, but may become universal in the next decade or so. Probably be required by law.
But currently, they're quite illegal without a warrant (though we all know they do it anyway, thanks "patriot act"!) which means you don't need to worry about it, as the evidence can't be used against you directly. Though they can (and do) pretend they got your information in some other way.
The various anons have it correct... cell pings towers constantly. If you have poor/no signal, phone amps up power to try to connect. To see this in action, wrap a phone in a few layers of tinfoil, seal it tight... come back in a bit, your phone is warm AND your battery is depleted.
DeleteAssuming that your phone is not in contact with towers if it is "off" is a mistake. Who knows what back doors exist, where it stores power.
Now, all those phones at the church... they probably geolocated them all, now they have associated all those phones... with EACH OTHER (same place, same time). They would have made a link diagram of everybody, then done traffic analysis on the externals (what number called what other #, when) and internals (possibly)... people's content of conversations, texts, etc.
I assume this is what went on.
To reuse that line from the "X-Files": "No matter how paranoid you are, you aren't paranoid enough."
DeleteGeofencing is a complicated subject, it can be as simple as setting your phone up to automatically open your garage door, turn on your lights and television when you pull up to within a certain distance from your home all the way to what the article is talking about... satellite tracking of your cellphone
ReplyDeleteTruth is that the only way to protect yourself from unwanted snooping is to leave your smartphone locked into a safe and never use it.... Of course cameras are everywhere so that has to be taken into consideration when minimizing your ability to be tracked by unknown busy bodies
JD
Starker here,
ReplyDeleteIt's not just GPS, it's having the phone on. It regularly connects to local cell towers, data on or not, and to WiFi to determine your relative position. It's usually good enough to resolve a rough address, say 500-510 Any St.
People today, except for us old farts who grew up without them, have no idea how to get from point A to point B without a phone GPS. There are some that grew up without them that use their phone exclusively when they travel outside of their known stomping grounds. Just this week I had to go to a town I'd never even been close to before for a funeral. The town is 80+ miles from where I live. Looked up the route on a paper map, wrote it down and got within about a quarter mile of the destination address. Then I had to ask a local for final directions. My phone was in the car, turned off, with location services also turned off(I turned off location services the first day I activated that phone and it has been of 99.99999% of the time since). The only reason I carry it when I'm out and about is in case I get in an accident or I have a vehicle breakdown.
ReplyDeleteSmart phones. Another object contributing to the dumbing down of America.
Nemo
Could be a verry innteresting First Amendment "Free Exercise Thereof" court case.
ReplyDeleteOf course, by the time it's settled, the perps will be long gone, replaced by a whole new set of assholes.
The satellites have nothing to do with this other than providing the timing signals (GPS) that the phone is using to determine it's location, that info is pushed to all of the apps and the carriers. The satellites are not "locking onto" anything in this sense.
ReplyDeleteWhenever on the road keep your cellphone in "Airplane Mode". Reference this article from one of the IT guys at work after I've been telling him this for years:
ReplyDeletehttps://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workspace-ONE-UEM/services/VMware-Workspace-ONE-SDK-for-iOS-(Swift)/GUID-AWT-GEOFENCE.html
Excellent technical discussion. It would seem to me that the biggest problem is what the .gov is allowed to do.
ReplyDeleteThe cell phone providers, internet service providers, search engine companies,(and probably credit card companies and banks) are willing to sell all of your information to marketers, which means the .gov doesn't even need special permission of any kind because the information is openly available. It is my impression that if there is any data available on anything, the .gov will get its hands on it by hook or by crook. Putting all of this data together in one place makes a pretty powerful analytical tool that I would prefer our government not have. We would have to live with the consequences of them being unable to do this, but:
My thought is that we need to start over with the int. agencies. Tell the people there that their pensions are intact, but go home and find something productive to do. (Same with the 2 DoE's, HUD, EPA, etc. but that is off-topic a bit).
If the data is there, the government will use it. Only solution is less of the government so they can't do as much damage. Reckon we could get a political movement centered around that idea? Step one - admit that however well-intended, the Patriot Act was an error - repeal it. Step two - eliminate the several information-gathering agencies that are causing much trouble. Step three - constitutional amendment enshrining some modern privacy protections consistent with the initial idea of the fourth amendment. Thanks for the post, sir!
My GPS is NEVER turned on.
ReplyDeleteFuck those nosy motherfuckers.
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