Not carrying a phone won't help you.
Pulling the SIM won't help you.
Look around you. See all those cameras? Not just the ones above your head in the supermarket that advertise HERE I AM, I'M A CAMERA, but every camera on every phone in the hands of every person you see can identify you and identify your exact location to the meter instantly based on your face and x other biometrics.
Everytime you speak, your voice pattern identifies you instantly.
Burner phones are a thing of the distant past. The moment you speak, the moment the camera "sees" you, your burner phone's IMEI is/can be mapped to your identity in double time.
The methods in use today are just way more sophisticated than the tech you've read about.
A drone at 20,000 feet can identify you in a crowd of 2,000 people based on the sound of your heart, your respiration, the shape of your head, your ears, your nose, your face, your facial profile, the shadow your body casts at x time of day, and/or the uniqueness of your gate. Combine them altogether with a scant amount of stat analysis and you can't hide even with effort.
Think darkness will hide you? Nope.
What’s needed is an agreement between all of us, in the form of privacy laws, that make certain uses of this data illegal.
In the future if you’re caught committing a crime by data captured in a manner illegal under these laws, it would have to be thrown out and can’t be used against you. Corps would also be banned from collecting, storing, and using personal data in an unlawful manner.
Feels like a pipe dream since there’s so much money in the industrial advertising complex, but I’m pretty sure that’s what it will take achieve reasonable levels of privacy.
Note the increased awareness brought by widely available cameras with immediate upload capability. The commenter above implied this is dystopian, but the opposite seems to have occurred -- as the public gains the capability to surveil the state, it constrains the state.
One case that personally always bothers me was regarding the murder of Philando Castile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile#Tr...
Technical solutions to privacy are not required to be alone. They're required to be ubiquitous. If your country is an authoritarian hellhole, you encrypt everything to help you not get murdered by the secret police. If your country has strong privacy protections, you encrypt everything to help ensure that it never becomes an authoritarian hellhole, and protect you against bureaucratic failures as defense in depth.
To invade your privacy, an attacker should have to break the law and break the encryption.
Even if you're innocent, they'll make something up. I lived for a year in one of those authoritarian hellholes and in that time knew two people who were arrested and hauled from station to station til someone paid a bribe- these weren't the dissidents either, just some guys. The dissident was stabbed to death on his doorstep.
Encryption is good to save us from marketing, from megacorps making our lives hell. Laws and norms constrain the rest.
An not to push my favorite TV show that doesn't involve aliens from outer space too much, but recent advances in AI are changing the equation here, making Person of Interest even more accurate and relevant than it already was.
It's all possible.
It's all scary - until one is the victim of a crime and the police don't think it's worth following up, or the presiding judge decides your time and suffering is less important than the future prospects of the criminal.
The cameras are not there to protect you from crime, they're there for control, to protect the CCP from the people.
I'm not principally against surveillance for public security but it's very hard to not have it abused - for a start you need authorities and a police force that have good intentions and work for the people, not against them. In most countries that's not a given.
To see this in practice, check out MVNOs offering prepaid mobile service. Some will disable certain features unless this physical E911 address is submitted by the customer.
What if there were a limitation on how that data can be used.
IANAL but the RAY BAUM’S act (yes, it's all caps because it's a silly initialism) only applies to location data that goes "with" a particular 911 call. Not your location before the call, nor your location after the call.
So if your cell-carrier is recording your location at all moments and persisting it indefinitely, no law was forcing them to do that, they are choosing to disrespect your privacy for their own profits or laziness.
Unfortunately, it's inconsistently deployed and not universally usable. This is likely the result of a lack of a sufficiently-staffed regulatory body auditing for compliance and correctness because it doesn't work everywhere with all phones on all carriers even when there is the technical ability, e.g., phone has a fix. It hasn't delivered completely on its promise because it's an under-funded, under-audited mandate that needs serious carrots and sticks to ensure it's reliable.
Do we really believe that Congress authored a law to improve "safety" but that had enormous privacy implications, while accidentally forgetting to also deal with the other 99.999+% of the time that the average person's location data is not involved with an emergency? Why were the legislation (and debate) conspicuously silent on limiting (let alone criminalizing) use and retention of location data, let alone resale (e.g. to data brokers or private parties?)
In this case, the site was selling real-time location data from cell carriers, meaning that there was virtually nothing that an individual could use to protect themselves (short of using a burner or no phone at all).
It’s great to see some strong action is being taken here against the sale of location data, and I hope the bans can be extended more broadly (and to Canada, please!)