Thursday, September 23, 2010

Your cell phone and what it means to you: Where are you?

By using a cell phone we are willingly giving information all about us to the mothership (Government, Google, FDA Communications).

Your phone has a tie directly with your SSN, perfect for database storage and if you aren't aware ubiquitous computing is a leading research field for colleges and industry. In short the idea of this is how can we store information about you and keep you in context of what you are doing and what we think is important to you. This should flag a concern about your lack of privacy.

Your phone can tell anyone looking about where you are. I'm assuming that you are smart enough not to use the Facebook locations/twitter locations publicly.

GPS ties directly to satellites to tell you where you are. You are also telling the phone company where you are. Someone has access to this, so this is a privacy threat to your person.

Lets say GPS is turned off. Using signal strengths of the towers, on your phone you can be triangulated to your position pretty accurately. Cell phone towers are placed so that when you pass from the radius of one tower's coverage to the other, the transition of moving should not be transparent to you. This means that the coverage of the towers are going to overlap some to give some time for transition and load of an area.

S1: I'm doing something that could be thought of being questionable to an outside viewer
S2: If I do an action that could go against my moral outward person I would prefer to be in private.
S3: There are some things that I have to do, but I would rather other people not know about.
S4: If people cannot see me do something, then they do not know I'm doing it.
S5: I want to do this activity in private.

Sometimes S1 can directly imply S4 or S2 implies S5 or S3 implies S5.
Happen in combination:
S1 and S2 and S4 imply S5 or S1 and S3 and S4 imply S5.

Argument 1: I'm not doing anything wrong, so I don't have anything to worry about.

We are asking to be set in a position to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

With location alone you can't say that you know something about someone, but more information you can deduce more informatino about you.