At 17:22 15/07/2012, Arthur wrote:
Really dont need hundreds of thousands of
trackers and analysts to keep real-time info of
tens of millions of users. Its mostly computer gathering and analysis.
Yes, I appreciate this -- this is what computers
can do -- but how to you categorize this mass of
information in such a way that you can home in on
individuals you want to track (possible new
terrorists) or to match precise adverts to
individual customers. On the latter point I
recently saw an interview with Martin Sorrell,
CEO of WPP, the largest advertising agency in the
world. He said that as users continue to migrate
from TV to PC/smartphones he was baffled as to
what advertisers will be able to do without annoying potential customers.
Keith
See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining
And
<http://www.rt.com/news/personal-data-smartphones-vulnarable/>http://www.rt.com/news/personal-data-smartphones-vulnarable/
From: Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2012 10:21 AM
To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION; Arthur Cordell
Subject: Re: [Futurework] That's No Phone. That's My Trac ker.
Arthur,
If I possessed a cell phone -- which I don't --
I shouldn't be at all bothered that I could be
tracked nor that a great deal would be known
about my consumer predilections in detail. In
any one country, hundreds of thousands of
trackers and analysts would be necessary to keep
real-time info of tens of millions of users. On
the commercial front, it is already the case
that smart phone manufacturers and advertising
agencies are finding it impossible to know how
to use their products for precision advertising.
(In truth the big advertising agencies are
becoming quite desperate that what was once
thought to be an amazing future is now running
between their fingers.) It's one thing for
adverts to break into couch viewing of TV or for
the printed media to carry whole-page spreads;
it's quite another for advertisers to break into
person-to-person chats on the phone. On the
governmental side, no advanced government that
I'm aware of (save two small ones), already
deeply in debt could possibly afford to expand
their spy departments -- already quite sizeable
when trying to dip into the movements and intentions of terrorists.
Keith
At 14:42 15/07/2012, you wrote:
Thats No Phone. Thats My Tracker.
* by PETER MAASS and MEGHA RAJAGOPALAN
* July 13, 2012 NY Times.com
THE device in your purse or jeans that you think
is a cellphone guess again. It is a tracking
device that happens to make calls. Lets stop
calling them phones. They are trackers.
Most doubts about the principal function of
these devices were erased when
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/us/cell-carriers-see-uptick-in-requests-to-aid-surveillance.html?_r=2&ref=surveillanceofcitizensbygovernment>it
was recently disclosed that cellphone carriers
responded 1.3 million times last year to law
enforcement requests for call data. Thats not
even a complete count, because T-Mobile, one of
the largest carriers, refused to reveal its
numbers. It appears that millions of cellphone
users have been swept up in government
surveillance of their calls and where they made
them from. Many police agencies
<http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/results-our-nationwide-cell-phone-tracking-records-requests>dont
obtain search warrants when requesting location data from carriers.
Thanks to the explosion of GPS technology and
smartphone apps, these devices are also taking
note of what we buy, where and when we buy it,
how much money we have in the bank, whom we text
and e-mail, what Web sites we visit, how and
where we travel, what time we go to sleep and
wake up and more. Much of that data is shared
with companies that use it to offer us services they think we want.
We have all heard about the wonders of
frictionless sharing, whereby social networks
automatically let our friends know what we are
reading or listening to, but what we hear less
about is frictionless surveillance. Though we
invite some tracking think of our mapping
requests as we try to find a restaurant in a
strange part of town much of it is done without our awareness.
Every year, private companies spend millions of
dollars developing new services that track,
store and share the words, movements and even
the thoughts of their customers, writes
<http://paulohm.com/>Paul Ohm, a law professor
at the University of Colorado. These invasive
services have proved irresistible to consumers,
and millions now own sophisticated tracking
devices (smartphones) studded with sensors and
always connected to the Internet.
Mr. Ohm labels them tracking devices. So does
Jacob Appelbaum, a developer and spokesman for
the <https://www.torproject.org/>Tor project,
which allows users to browse the Web
anonymously. Scholars have called them
minicomputers and robots. Everyone is struggling
to find the right tag, because cellphone and
smartphone are inadequate. This is not a
semantic game. Names matter, quite a bit. In
politics and advertising, framing is regarded as
essential because what you call something
influences what you think about it. Thats why
there are battles over the tags Obamacare and death panels.
In just the past few years, cellphone companies
have honed their geographic technology, which
has become almost pinpoint. The surveillance and
privacy implications are quite simple. If
someone knows exactly where you are, they
probably know what you are doing. Cellular
systems constantly check and record the location
of all phones on their networks and this data
is particularly treasured by police departments
and online advertisers. Cell companies typically
retain your geographic information for a year or
longer,
<http://www.aclu.org/files/pdfs/freespeech/retention_periods_of_major_cellular_service_providers.pdf>according
to data gathered by the Justice Department.
Whats the harm? The United States Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,
<http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/FF15EAE832958C138525780700715044/%24file/08-3030-1259298.pdf>ruling
about the use of tracking devices by the police,
noted that GPS data can reveal whether a person
is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a
regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an
outpatient receiving medical treatment, an
associate of particular individuals or political
groups and not just one such fact about a
person, but all such facts. Even the most
gregarious of sharers might not reveal all that on Facebook.
There is an even more fascinating and diabolical
element to what can be done with location
information.
<http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428441/a-phone-that-knows-where-youre-going/>New
research suggests that by cross-referencing your
geographical data with that of your friends,
its possible to predict your future whereabouts
with a much higher degree of accuracy.
This is whats known as predictive modeling, and
it requires nothing more than your cellphone data.
If we are naïve to think of them as phones, what
should we call them?
<http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/>Eben Moglen, a
law professor at Columbia University, argues
that they are robots for which we the proud
owners are merely the hands and feet. They
see everything, theyre aware of our position,
our relationship to other human beings and other
robots, they mediate an information stream
around us, he has said. Over time, weve used
these devices less for their original purpose. A
<http://news.o2.co.uk/Press-Releases/Making-calls-has-%20become-fifth-most-frequent-use-for-a-Smartphone-for-%20newly-networked-generation-of-users-390.aspx>recent
survey by <http://www.o2.co.uk/>O2, a British
cell carrier, showed that making calls is the
fifth-most-popular activity for smartphones;
more popular uses are Web browsing, checking
social networks, playing games and listening to
music. Smartphones are taking over the functions
that laptops, cameras, credit cards and watches once performed for us.
If you want to avoid some surveillance, the best
option is to use cash for prepaid cellphones
that do not require identification. The phones
transmit location information to the cell
carrier and keep track of the numbers you call,
but they are not connected to you by name.
Destroy the phone or just drop it into a trash
bin, and its data cannot be tied to you. These
cellphones, known as burners, are the threads
that connect privacy activists, Burmese dissidents and coke dealers.
Prepaids are a hassle, though. What can the rest
of us do? Leaving your smartphone at home will
help, but then whats the point of having it?
Turning it off when youre not using it will
also help, because it will cease pinging your
location to the cell company, but are you really
going to do that? Shutting it down does not even
guarantee its off malware can keep it on
without your realizing it. The only way to be
sure is to take out the battery. Guess what? If
you have an
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/iphone/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>iPhone,
you will need a tiny screwdriver to remove the
back cover. Doing that will void your warranty.
<http://www.crypto.com/>Matt Blaze, a professor
of computer and information science at the
University of Pennsylvania, has written
extensively about these issues and believes we
are confronted with two choices: Dont have a
cellphone or just accept that youre living in
the
<https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3A++panopticon&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-beta>Panopticon.
There is another option. People could call them
trackers. Its a neutral term, because it covers
positive activities monitoring appointments,
bank balances, friends and problematic ones,
like the government and advertisers watching us.
We can love or hate these devices or love and
hate them but it would make sense to call them
what they are so we can fully understand what they do.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/thats-not-my-phone-its-my-tracker.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120715>http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/thats-not-my-phone-its-my-tracker.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120715
http://tinyurl.com/d7govv7
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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