No, we can't text, get email, surf the toobz, take pictures, listen to music or whatthefuckever else people do with their smartphones.

I have a nice iPod mini I still keep loaded with music and playlists, for listening to music.

I have a little digital camera about the same size as the iPod mini for taking pictures.

I have an ancient (by tech standards) off-brand e-ink based reader with more than 500 books on it, and no internet connection.

If I really want to get email or surf the toobz I can fire up an elderly Samsung Android tablet. Or (much more likely) just sit down at my desktop computer, at home or work, and open an enhanced privacy browser.

I get by.

I'm sure someone somewhere is getting more info about me than I'd like them to have. But I'm also sure that no one can figure out where I am unless I tell them. Among other benefits.

Yeah, it's extra trouble.

My privacy, my control over information about myself, is worth it.

disgustedly,
Bright

Is someone figuring out how boring my life is.

Good one, and that was not boring, made me laugh.

and you believe you have "privacy"?

Older cell phones can be tracked by when they ping a cell tower.

From what I understand not just smartphones reveal their locations.

So unless you travel with your phone off, there's probably a history of locations your phone has passed through while powered on.

Otherwise we use the old-fashioned land line.

Rarely, I give the number to someone and tell them to call me there at a particular time, and turn it on for the purpose of receiving such a call.

As noted, I'm sure that more information than I'd like, concerning me and my devices and their usage, is in various databases.

But I make a conscious effort to minimize it.

At least until we get serious legal protections and the enforcement to make them meaningful.

futilely,
Bright

It sounds like cell tower triangulation, which can be do to any cell device, not just smart phones. If they were using smart phone GPS location, the accuracy would be much higher than a "few blocks". If they could gain access to a smart phone's GPS service, the location would be on the order of 10s of feet or better.

Since I'm not involved with any thing that could be considered criminal or seditious, the only thing that any one could find, as another person already said, was how boring my life really is.

A private detective is the defense attorneys equivalent to a prosecuting attorneys ability to direct police detectives to investigate and gather information against you. A private detective is your only chance for a fair trial. As such a private detective has to have many of the powers that a police detective has. If a private detective does not have these powers justice will not be served. In my short experience as a detective the most dishonest people I encountered were -- prosecuting attorneys. Without the ability to double check a prosecuting attorneys data, defendants will never get a fair trial. Like it or not, and I don't like it, a private detective has to be able to do these things because we let police detectives do these things.

As a detective I had to get regular training to continue to be certified. In that training I was taught a lot of interesting methods. The phone companies will sell accounts where you can change your ID and where you can hide your data while capturing all of the data on a location when they call you or answer the phone. So, for a yearly fee you can appear to be a hospital or a movie company and change it whenever you want. You can "get a wrong number" and know right where someone is.

As a detective I was not allowed to impersonate an officer or government official. Apart from that I was encouraged to lie, lie, lie. The reason you need to shut up and get an attorney is very simple. The police are trained to lie, lie, lie. The police are trained to tell you false things about what you are accused of and to take your simplest answers and be able to prove anything they want with them. From the very roots of our justice system, dishonesty is carefully taught to our providers of justice.

So here is the problem. We need private detectives to have the same resources as police or there is no justice. If we have police allowed to use invasive tools, we must have private detectives with invasive tools. Every single time we give more power and latitude to police, we reduce our privacy and our personal security. Every time we decide to be tough on crime we give more power to people that we have trained to lie.

You may have not realized it but right now you are a suspect. If you do anything unusual you will become an interesting suspect. Your data is being collected and if it matches up with any criteria on a list somewhere, even more of your data will be captured.

Meanwhile, corporations can hire detectives and have them investigate for them. Corporations have access to all of these tools and they are using them for their personal gain and to destroy people who are in their way. A mobster or a Russian agent can also hire a detective. They can even set up a shell company to own another company and name it something really nifty while having an employee look up all sorts of stuff on you.

The root of this problem is that we have allowed our government to have these powers. We have let politicians who are bought by corporations to appear to be tough on crime while taking away our personal freedoms. As long as we allow the government such exception to our rights as citizens, we will continue to have to allow private detectives, i.e. bounty hunters, security services and the like much more power than they should have.

A lot of folk are silly enough to think they can be strong on crime while being against big government. Tough on crime means big prisons, big invasions of privacy and arbitrary powers invested in government.

After Motherboard’s article, Senators Kamala Harris, Mark Warner, and Ron Wyden are coming out against telcos who are selling their customers' location data.

On Tuesday, Motherboard revealed that major American telcos T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint are selling customer location data of users in an unregulated market that trickles down to bounty hunters and people not authorized to handle such information. In our investigation, we purchased the real-time location of a cell phone from a bail industry source for $300, pinpointing it to a specific part of Queens, New York.

The issue potentially impacts hundreds of millions of cell phone users in the United States, with customers likely unaware that their location data is being sold and resold through multiple companies, with even the telcos sometimes having little idea where it ends up and how it is used.

Now, Senators and a commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have urged government bodies to investigate, with some calling for regulation that would ensure customers are properly made aware of how their data is being sold.



https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5z74d/senators-harris-warner-wyden-fcc-investigate-att-sprint-tmobile-bounty-hunters

AT&T said Thursday it will stop selling its customers' location data to third-party service providers after a report this week said the information was winding up in the wrong hands.

The announcement follows sharp demands by federal lawmakers for an investigation into the alleged misuse of data, which came to light when Motherboard revealed a complex chain of unauthorized information-sharing that ended with a bounty hunter successfully tracking down a reporter’s device.

AT&T had already suspended its data sharing agreements with a number of so-called “location aggregators” last year in light of a congressional probe finding that some of Verizon’s location data was being misused by prison officials to spy on innocent Americans. AT&T also said at the time it would be maintaining those of its agreements that provided clear consumer benefits, such as location sharing for roadside assistance services.

But AT&T’s announcement Thursday goes much further, pledging to terminate all of the remaining deals it had — even the ones that it said were actively helpful.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/01/10/phone-companies-are-selling-your-location-data-now-some-lawmakers-want-federal-investigation/