Re:The $24B Data Business That Telcos Don't Want to Talk About
by mindslight on Tuesday October 27, 2015 @05:14PM
(#10461189)
> If the cellular provider doesn't know who you are, why does it matter if they track your location?
I guess they won't, so you'd defeat some commercial advertising. But the location information still gets dumped to government databases which will easily correlate your path to home/work/friends/CC etc and find an identity for that IMEI. It's similar to saying that Bitcoin is "anonymous" - sure, if you jump through a lot of opsec hoops you can achieve privacy for a particular transaction. But the system lacks the stronger property of untraceability, which is required for common casual users to retain their privacy.
Psuedononymous PSTN access doesn't actually seem that hard - a prepaid CC to some VOIP provider. It's just orthogonal to location tracking, so I haven't thought much about it.
I guess they won't, so you'd defeat some commercial advertising. But the location information still gets dumped to government databases which will easily correlate your path to home/work/friends/CC etc and find an identity for that IMEI. It's similar to saying that Bitcoin is "anonymous" - sure, if you jump through a lot of opsec hoops you can achieve privacy for a particular transaction. But the system lacks the stronger property of untraceability, which is required for common casual users to retain their privacy.
Psuedononymous PSTN access doesn't actually seem that hard - a prepaid CC to some VOIP provider. It's just orthogonal to location tracking, so I haven't thought much about it.