The Cell-phone Industry and Privacy Advocates VS Cell Phone Tracking

I've once mentioned various privacy issues related to mobile devices, the growing trend of "assets tracking", and of course, cell phones tracking. Yesterday I came across to great summary of the current situation -- privacy groups make a point of it. From the article :



"Real-time tracking of cell phones is possible because mobile phones are constantly sending data to cell towers, which allows incoming calls to be routed correctly. The towers record the strength of the signal along with the side of the tower the signal is coming from. This allows the phone's position to be easily triangulated to within a few hundred yards. But the legal grounds for obtaining a tracking order is murky -- not surprising since technology often outpaces legislation. The panel agreed that Congress should write rules governing what level of suspicion cops need to have before tracking people through their cell phones."



While on the other hand, there's also an ongoing commercialization of the service by the industry itself, if the government were to start using practices like these with grey subpoenas, it would undermine the customers' trust in the industry and BigBrother is going to get even bigger. Enthusiasts are already experimenting with DIY cell phone tracking abilities, so if you worry about being tracked through your phone, you should also start worrying about having an extra one in your bag. Physical insecurities such as digital forensics on cell phones, even counter-offerings are today's reality, while flexible lawful wiretapping may still be taking one way or another -- I guess the NSA got all the attention recently, with their domestic spying program.



As the Mindmaker pointed out, we must assume that we are trackable wherever we go, but I think this dependence would get even more abused in the future by the time proposed laws match with the technology. Continue reading →

Privacy issues related to mobile and wireless Internet access

I just came across a research worth checking out by all the wardrivers and mobile/wireless Internet users out there. While it's written in 2004, "Privacy, Control and Internet Mobility", provides relevant info on an important topic - what kind of information is leaking and how can this be reduced. The abstract describes it as :



"This position paper explores privacy issues created by mobile and wireless Internet access. We consider the information about the users identity, location, and the serviced accessed that is necessarily or unnecessarily revealed observers, including the access network, interme- diaries within the Internet, and the peer endpoints. In particular, we are interested in data that can be collected from packet headers and signaling messages and exploited to control the users access to communications resources and online services. We also suggest some solutions to reduce the amount of information that is leaked."



A more in-depth overview on the topic can also be found in "A Framework for Location Privacy in Wireless Networks", an excerpt :



"For example, even if an anonymous routing protocol such as ANODR is used, an attacker can track a user's location through each connection, and associate multiple connections with the same user. When the user arrives at home, she will have left a trail of packet crumbs which can be used to determine her identity. In this paper, we explore some of the possible requirements and designs, and present a toolbox of several techniques that can be used to achieve the required level of privacy protection."



Mobile/Wireless location privacy would inevitable emerge as an important issue given the growth of that type of communication, and the obvious abuses of it.



Technorati tags :
Security, Privacy, Wireless, Mobile, Tracking Continue reading →