Digital privacy reporters for ProPublica, argue cellphones primarily tracking owners...

[midnight]

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/forget_cellphones_call_them_trackers_20120715/?ln


"Mobile phone service providers collect user information and share it with the government, to the tune of at least 1.3 million disclosures per year. What if our nomenclature reflected that?

Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan, digital privacy reporters for ProPublica, argue that cellphones function primarily as tools for keeping tabs on their owners. And our best hopes for addressing the dangers inherent in that fact begin with calling them by their rightful name."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/thats-not-my-phone-its-my-tracker.html?_r=1&ref=opinion


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, 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, 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 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 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."



http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_william_binney_20120714/?ln
"The analytic group developed a program called ThinThread that automatically collected and analyzed email and telephone data while protecting users’ privacy. It was a smashing success, so much so that Binney’s boss, the new director of the NSA Transition Office (NTO) and a former executive of an association of defense and intelligence contractors called Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), told Binney to keep quiet about it. Showing that the group had solved the problem of data collection would make the agency’s corporate partners redundant, Binney explained, and that would be the end of their funding. Against his will, Binney was successfully silenced."