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A comment on Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems at refineries.

Re:Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems... by rando444 on Thursday March 28, 2019 @04:37PM (#19516346)
A clever person could defeat this entire system in a day.

If you look at the graph, currently we're talking about a fluctuation of about 7 devices.

All you'd have to do is set up a handful of devices (or emulate them and spoof the GPS).. download some sketchy apps, or look for apps that have ties to this company, to bump the location information up. Then turn the devices on or off, so that there's never any change.

If I was the oil company I'd probably set up a shell company to buy the data feed as well so I could get it perfect.

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Re:Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems... by jedberg on Thursday March 28, 2019 @05:30PM (#19516835)
If you're the oil company you probably don't care one bit if a trader is making money on the price of oil, because it isn't coming out of the oil companies profits. It's coming from other traders.
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Re:Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems... by ravibala1 on Friday March 29, 2019 @03:53AM (#19519888)
Almost single major oil company & refinery has a team of traders that directly participate (or use the investment banks / futures brokers) in the crude oil and refined product futures / options markets. This is both for hedging and speculation. If a refinery knows when it's going down for (un)planned, it lets it's traders know and they do trade on that info. In commodities markets, this is legal and does not constitute insider trading.
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Re:Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems... by mlevental on Thursday March 28, 2019 @08:27PM (#19518028)
if that were true they would just publicize their production numbers
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Re:Oil traders are watching workers’ phones to spot problems... by jedberg on Friday March 29, 2019 @12:29AM (#19519160)
They still don't want their competitors to know how well they're doing or their suppliers, who might increase their prices if they know the company is doing well.
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