Your mobile phone is a homing device

by Eoin Dubsky Wed Feb 18, 2004 18:36

I should add that I was looking for location based services in Ireland, expecting to find some notice saying "due to EU privacy laws we cannot disclose..." -- even for harmless, end-user location based services like a car-pool organizer, chatting or other social app. But instead I have found that O2 are happy to assist employers spy on their employees (see their "View worker locations" graphic at the link above). Vodafone probably do the same, and when I get home I'll go looking for my user agreement (the one printed in tiny grey writing) and read over the privacy bits again.

by Watcher Wed Feb 18, 2004 19:34

And see how they try to cover themselves with the line

"-Improve employee's safety by monitoring their whereabouts " [yeah right]

Or probably that old cctv bon mot "If your afraid of it then you must be up to no good."will be used.
No and neithers the watcher cos he be the good guy, in black and white wurld.

This system also means your employer could spy on you when when your not working.
"You were sick you say. Our location reports suggest not".
Can you turn off the GPRS functionality on your phone? And if so will your company allow you?
Could your employer use your "historical reports for route histories " to sell to buisnesses and corporations?

Could you imagine such a system linked up to say a linked network of cctvs, each with face and walking recogniton software, 1984 twenty years late man.

by kokomero Wed Feb 18, 2004 19:36

One way to solve this is by switching off your phone. And you can always tell your boss the battery ran low and you had to charge it etc.

Secondly they are not that accurate. To the best of my knowledge nodody can do location to better than a few hundred metres in urban areas and this is only in the case they've augmented their network with the appropriate additional hardware in the basestations.

Given the the low population density in Ireland and the associated economics it is unlikely they can locate anybody to much better than the nearest square kilometer and more likely the nearest cell-ID. In my opinion this is a scheme to milk yet more cash out of gullible bosses!

by Paul Wed Feb 18, 2004 21:17

Actually I think ( and this is from court cases abroad) that they can pin point you to the exact street within about 10 metres.

by winston Wed Feb 18, 2004 21:46

From what i could get from the site the service would apply to company phones, so the best advice is not to accept one or else leave it off and use your own phone. If it applies to your employer being able to track your private phone then than is well out of order. If you have a company phone and you take a day off just leave it at home ,off or reroute calls to your own phone so you can answer it wherever you are and make the boss think you are at home, then you can go anywhere, such phones could be used to make the boss think you are where you are meant to be. Picture your phone on silent in a drawer at work, the boss uses O2 to find out where you are and all he can tell is you are in the building somewhere while you have a bit of a lie in at home.

by iosaf Wed Feb 18, 2004 22:41

if this causes you problems then leave your phone where your boss want's you to be during those little moments when you want to be somewhere else.
Contrary to popular belief you will survive without your mobile, and may even discover your fingers again. Also without hexagonal modelling, you can only pinpoint a phone between three cells this will give you only part of the location.
I'll explain:- if you are on the tenth floor of a building or the first, your triangulated location signal will still be the same. Yet you are really very far away.
and this little problem causes loads of cruise missile launches quite a bit of hassle.
which is why hexagonal modelling is so big, in fact it's so mega big that if you're good at it, they'll give you a fake funeral (complete with really good Telegraph obituary) , a new name and possibly even a new face and move you away into their secret labs to work on it.

by Deirdre Clancy Wed Feb 18, 2004 22:49

I have huge doubts about the efficacy of what 02 are offering in terms of spying capabilities. I am not a techie by any means, but I know the technology exists to locate someone down to the street level. However, unless a particular company is willing to pour money into such an employee surveillance operation, rather than just going for 02's very low-level stuff about what cell the person is in, I doubt there's much danger of privacy being invaded to a huge degree.

I am not saying I approve of this being offered to employers - it's appalling. But it's only another small example of the surveillance-type society we are living in. Chances are your movements will be caught on camera when you take a sickie and go for a walk around town anyway.

by carrier pigeon Thu Feb 19, 2004 01:19

in a bbc documentary about the omagh bombing they showed how police were able to track calls made in the run up to the bomb going off. They knew which phones were calling other phones and what base station they were near.

And in the case of people driving they could plot their journey.

Nothing new but now its a public spying service???

And eircom is run by americans

they're watching everyone - the scardi-cats

by T Thu Feb 19, 2004 03:13

The only thing is the employer would have access to the O2 service. They would'nt have access to any of the usual CCTVs on the street and in stores around the place. And besides even if they did , the sheer volume of material to sift through would be not worth the hassel.

In the near future though, the State may have the resources to do the latter.

By the way, triangulatation is possible, but I am not too sure if it is switched on.

In cities the radio cells are much smaller, less than one km, and using just the cell based method, would give reasonable use.

For example, if you were at home sick with your work mobile switched on and they know you live in say Blackrock, but the O2 service says you are out in Tallaght, then it would be clear you are not exactly at home.

One other thing, as far as I know in the USA, new phones maybe already now or soon, will have to be fitted with GPS (not to be confused with GPRS) chips for location purposes and will easily locate you to within 10 or 20 metres. Allegedly this was because so many people used mobiles for emergencies (say on roads) and never knew where they were exactly and the GPS would then kick in on such a call and transfer the GPS co-ords.

It is possible that some phones on the market here have GPS chips already, but can't be certain.

I think the market/technology and formats and standards are still be ironed out here and it will be another year or two before we begin to see these things as mainstream. There is a lot of commerical pressure to bring in location based services as these are seen as a potential 'killer application' that could generate lots of revenue.

[GPS = Global Position Satellite system]
[GPRS = General Packet Radio System -this is the protocol for transmitting data over mobile phone networks and is relatively new. It's part of the GSM standard, sort of.]

by kokomero Thu Feb 19, 2004 12:23

They've been trying to get phone companies to put GPS into phones for years but the problem is how to make money out of it.

The E911 requirement in the US , which has nothing to do with Sept. 11th, requires that operators be able to locate a mobile phone call to within 100m with 90% accuracy for 911 calls only as they were having big problems in getting emergency services to the site of accidents reported by mobile phone.

There is no such requirement in Ireland nor is there the population to justify the modifications to the netwrok on the basis of commercial opportunities for location-based services.

None of these technologies are fool-proof and can only give a probability of someone being at that location as they could be in motion in a car etc., and due to reflections of the signal from a cell-phone off buildings in urban areas which makes it more difficult to triangulate accurately.

Tracking people within a concrete building is extremely difficult with GPS or any other radio technology.

The only way they can track you to 10m accuracy is if they know (relatively speaking) where you are going to be, ie you are under surveillance already!

by no work to do! Thu Feb 19, 2004 12:26

could your homing device become a mobile?
scary eh!

by David Thu Feb 19, 2004 13:16

Does this mean that the cops could go to O2 and ask them to report the location of a particular phone number in the run up to a protest action in order to intercept and arrest an individual on a made up motoring offense?

by billy the kid Thu Feb 19, 2004 13:18

In the meantime (Thursday, 12.16) that particular page has disappeared from the O2 website.

Hard to imagine that they're keeping that close an eye on Indymedia - maybe some journo picked up the story and did some cack-handed "research"?

by Joe Thu Feb 19, 2004 13:21

It's just the UL was badly entered in the original story to include brackets. The right address is linked below

by Lone gunman Thu Feb 19, 2004 13:36

Put a covert tracking device in your company car or van,using the same technology.which you would not be able to object to because[1] it aint your vechicle,[2]and they are worried about theft or mileage abuse.
Soo your boss could track you via the car.
Your choices are; get a cell phone jammer,jam every phone within 3meters of you.Thats the handheld unit![illegal in Ireland,as per usual]
Keep and use your older phone[sensible and eco friendly,less complicated as well]
Insist that any company phones issued from 02 have this feature disabled.
Read your terms of employment especially Re privacy etc.
Any naughty activities you might be engaged in. Go back to the good old pay phone outside your neighbourhood[thousands of drug dealers cant be wrong!]

Dont want to be found by your phone?Divert the calls,switch off.Pull the battery[it can still be active with the power source installed]
Activate it again when you want to be "found"

by Eoin Dubsky Thu Feb 19, 2004 13:41

I've lost the URL now, but last night I found a website for a company who make mobile phone location based services for chatting, flirting, etc... They explained that they could sometimes even tell you which way someone's phone is pointing (I guess the signal is directed away from the keypad area, which is closest to your face when using the phone).

In any case, in Prague if you have a phone from one of the local Czech networks (not roaming from abroad), your handset will say which street you're on. Turn a corner and it says the name of the new street after a few seconds.

The point of writing this here isn't to say "oh no, mobile phone companies might know where we are!" -- its that they may be using this information to help employers (and others) spy on us.

For an interactive map of mobile phone radio masts in Ireland see: http://www.comreg.ie/siteviewer/site_search.asp

by Lone gunman Thu Feb 19, 2004 17:44

You are still safe.It was in one of the papers recently about the Garda top brass bitching & moaning about the unavailability of information to them from the mobile companies,and that they are stymied by the privacy laws and data protection act,even when it is a ligit criminal investigation.
Going by how efficent our phone and inter communication between law enforcement units are. i would safely say you would be at home in bed by the time the cops get any "real time" location on where you are in a demo.
As for the Czeh device Eoin was on about. .It is a micro cell unit. IE a small transmitter that covers maybe three four blocks.If your phone has GPS,all it does is trigger its location on the GPS map in your phone.And inform you as well of what pubs,or other useless ifo its sponsors might think you need.AKA advertising.
Solution to beat this.Get or download a bog standard paper street map.

by can't stop. Fri Feb 20, 2004 21:53

The x-ray tube is going to make some noise.
Déanfaidh an feadán x-ghatha fothram.

by Ian Brady Thu Jun 10, 2004 22:08 an_fhear at NOSPAMyahoo dot com

Does anyone know where I can find an online map of mobile phone masts in the Dublin area. I came across it before but didn't bookmark it and needless to say I can't find it now.

by bn Mon Jun 14, 2004 18:22

Of course thats exactly what they do David.Note turning your phone off makes no difference (remarkably they can turn it on again silently).So for a given protest they will track the signals as they go down the Navan Road say , then look at the dispersal pattern of those signals and track them on foot or car.Also they might have historic tracking information on those signals so you will find that they can see where the people came from before they went on the march.
In fact it gets worse , they can use a mobile phone as a listening device (they just silently turn on your microphone ) and pick up conversations around the phone that way. To clarify thats not just conversations of you using the phone , this is a bug.It seems they can do this without in any way tampering with the phone beforehand and it seems without needing the permission or equipment of the mobile phone companies.Taking the battery out would seem a good idea on occasion!!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3522137.stm

by the merovignian Mon Jun 14, 2004 19:58

my effing mobile is never in coverage area.
always spewing out crap at me-
little colour satelite dish goes left up and right, "searching signal" then flashes "no signal" or "emergency only" or something.-
I'd prefer if it said "don't panic" or "stick a fish in your ear now".