On 05/31/2013 08:57 PM, Seth David Schoen wrote: > That seems to have some clear potential privacy and security benefits, > but if you use a MiFi with a 3G account registered in your own name, > the carrier will still be able to track the location of the MiFi > device itself and associate it with your identity. For a number of months in late 2010, I tried a personal experiment. I used a wifi-only phablet (the Galaxy Player 4-5" Wifi mini tablet) and set it up with a variety of ways to make plain old telephone calls over wifi. My goal was not to be anonymous, but to just not allow the mobile operator's to have a comprehensive record of my physical location. In my daily commute (Brooklyn to Manhattan, with a subway ride in between), I began to figure out where various free, open or easily registered wifi hotspots were located. My morning coffee spot had wifi with a password they happily gave out (that also worked from outside their window). The house on the corner near the subway entrance had an open hotspot. Madison Square Park had a community wifi node with easy "accept" registration, that worked pretty well, too.
All in all, it meant that I was never really offline for that long. If anyone had called or texted me in my short downtime, I could receive the notification of that, and call them back, usually within 15 minutes. By having a phone-type form factor device setup to work essentially like a phone, I was able to stand on the street, make calls, and do my business, without looking out of the ordinary. Since many of the VoIP/messaging services I was using were good at handling on/offline queuing, I could easily respond to a text message, knowing it would be sent when I walked by the next hotspot. Save for a few crackly, unintelligible calls now and then, it was a pretty successful experiment, and a way of life I am considering returning to. To be completely honest, in case of emergency or an absolute need to be reached, I had a cash-only burner phone always with me. I also had a mifi device, registered to my name. On some occasions, I did need to use this, but in the end, the small geo footprint left from the use of these, was miniscule to what it would have been if I had been using them full-time, instead of my wifi solution. In summary, if the focused threat you need to address is location tracking by carriers/operators, and you live in an area with a decent saturation of "open" wifi hotspots, I feel there is something you can do about it. Now your adversaries have to work a bit harder (tracking IPs to hotspots, physical surveillance, etc) to build a geo map of your comings and goings. Best, Nathan -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
