Good one.
D.
On 15/07/2012 5:16 PM, Arthur Cordell wrote:
If what you are getting online is for free, you are not the customer,
you are the product. -Jonathan
Zittrain, professor of Internet law (b. 1969)
*From:*Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]]
*Sent:* Sunday, July 15, 2012 1:40 PM
*To:* RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION; Arthur Cordell
*Subject:* RE: [Futurework] That's No Phone. That's My Tracker.
At 17:22 15/07/2012, Arthur wrote:
Really don't need hundreds of thousands of trackers and analysts to
keep real-time info of tens of millions of users. It's 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
And
http://www.rt.com/news/personal-data-smartphones-vulnarable/
*From:* Keith Hudson [mailto:[email protected]
<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:
That's No Phone. That's 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. Let's
stop calling them phones. They are trackers*.
Most doubts about the principal function of these devices were erased
when it was recently disclosed
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/us/cell-carriers-see-uptick-in-requests-to-aid-surveillance.html?_r=2&ref=surveillanceofcitizensbygovernment>that
cellphone carriers responded 1.3 million times last year to law
enforcement requests for call data. That's 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 don't obtain search warrants
<http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/results-our-nationwide-cell-phone-tracking-records-requests>
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 Paul Ohm
<http://paulohm.com/>, 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 Tor project
<https://www.torproject.org/>, 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. That's 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, according to
data
<http://www.aclu.org/files/pdfs/freespeech/retention_periods_of_major_cellular_service_providers.pdf>
gathered by the Justice Department.
*What's the harm? The United States Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia Circuit, ruling about the use of tracking devices
<http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/FF15EAE832958C138525780700715044/%24file/08-3030-1259298.pdf>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. New research
<http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428441/a-phone-that-knows-where-youre-going/>suggests
that by cross-referencing your geographical data with that of your
friends, it's possible to predict your future whereabouts with a much
higher degree of accuracy.
*
*This is what's 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?
Eben Moglen <http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/>, 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,
they're 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, we've used these devices less for their original
purpose. A recent survey
<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>
by O2 <http://www.o2.co.uk/>, 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 what's the point of having
it? Turning it off when you're 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 it's
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
iPhone
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/iphone/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>,
you will need a tiny screwdriver to remove the back cover. Doing that
will void your warranty.
*Matt Blaze <http://www.crypto.com/>, 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: "Don't have a cellphone or just accept that you're living in
the Panopticon
<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>."
*
*There is another option. People could call them trackers. It's 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://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
<http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/>
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