Crushing civil liberties? There’s an app for that!

I shall be sticking with my Palm Treo 650 for a while yet. As far as I know the only app on it that tracks anything is the one I use to keep track of my blood glucose.

I wonder how much $$$ Apple got and is getting from the US government to track everyone?

Why they are doing it with unencrypted files is curious, it is almost as if they want to be caught. If the files were encrypted, what they did would have remained obscure. Was Apple compelled to do this by the Bush administration? How much of the iPhone development cost was covered by the US government? How much subsidy is Apple getting to expand market share?

As I remember, Google got into a lot of trouble when they were mapping wifi locations in Europe because they recorded stuff. Are people with iPhones who travel in Europe going to get into the same trouble as Google got into? They are doing much the same thing, just on a smaller scale.

* Your phone operator knows your location. If they see a laptop MAC moving the same route as your phone, your laptop is associated with you in seconds.

* You use your laptop in a popular cafe. Another visitor doesn’t know which customer you are, unless you meet several times.

* Your writings to blogs can contain information that locates your movements. May take months.

It all depends on your threat model. If someone tries to find out your MAC, they can send a tail who gets close to you in a known location. Can happen in less than a day, and doesn’t require an iPhone. It can even be done automatically with a WLAN base station and a camera.

But luckily in most laptops you can change your MAC for fun and profit…

The data is extremely interesting to Google.

The accuracy of tracking via only cell towers increased enough over the years that the government required cell companies to use updated equipment so calls could be triangulated better from multiple towers (for emergency response).

10 years ago the phone companies swore on a stack of their quarterly reports that they didn’t store this information for any “reasonable” length of time due to the large amount of data and cost of storage. Today?

If you don’t want to be tracked in today’s world, it’s not an easy thing to accomplish. You can start by turning off your cell phone, taking the battery out, wrapping the phone tightly in aluminum foil, then putting it in a mylar bag. Or, I suppose, you could just drop it in the river and walk away.

But in the long run even pseudonomous tracking will collect enough information to identify the person.

That means that once there is overlapping coverage, every single wifi device within that overlapping coverage is located.

With that data base you could track anyone and everyone that has any wifi device, even people without an iPhone or iPad.

It isn’t just spying on you, it is spying on everyone around you.