It's still really hard to get around the privacy invasions of a smartphone, though. I'd like something without GPS and for which I can completely control the OS and environment. CyanogenMod seems to be as close as I'm likely to get to that at present.
Richard Stallman, as usual, was quite ahead of the curve on this topic when he noted that he didn't carry a cell phone of any kind because of the privacy considerations associated with logging your location, accurately with triangulation, against cell towers.
The instant you start using a cell phone consistently, you've effectively handed over a log of your location history to whoever can convince the sysadmin in your cellular carriers NOC to to give them the data. And that's a pretty big list.
- When people want to point out that "Stallman predicted this X years ago," they phase it as, "Richard Stallman was right, as usual." Richard Stallman is not infallible. Overstating one's case doesn't win any new friends.
- There are many of Stallman's "followers" that are very aggressive at promoting the GPLv3 over all other open source licenses. While this might not be Stallman's personal position on the matter, if definitely doesn't win many people over (and probably pushes many away).
- Richard Stallman isn't necessarily the most lovable and charismatic figure. While people shouldn't factor that in to things when evaluating his message, they do.
But in a corner of the world where predictions are a dime a gross, Stallman's made many, and his record of hits is considerable.
Adding to his credibility and significance are the fact that:
⚫ He's not commercially vested in his predictions. Unlike virtually everyone else in the space, whose "technology forecaster" title is followed by some company name.
⚫ His logic is Talmudic in its rigor. If Stallman has a position on something, it's virtually always because he's thought it through very thoroughly. Even if you don't agree with the conclusions (or if it turns out he was wrong), you're almost always better off knowing why he came to that conclusion.
⚫ He gores sacred cows. Much of the antipathy toward Stallman comes from those whose business model he's just invalidated. Or worse, proven to be utterly and completely socially and morally indefensible.
When people take the phrase: " Stallman was right, as usual." and suggest that this is a claim of infallibility. Overstating one's case doesn't win any new friends.
The claim is that on these issues Stallman is more usually right than wrong. Do you have anything that suggests otherwise?
'As usual' is unnecessary unless you're trying to passively aggressively say "I told you so," or imply that people should blindly accept everything that Stallman says.
I would hardly tell anyone to blindly accept everything or anything Stallman (or for the matter, any charismatic leader) says.
However, "I told you so" is a phrase much needed these days... specially directed towards people that insist on making the same kind of mistakes that drove us to the mess we're right now.
If you wonder why people don't listen to you, phrasing like this comes across as condescending, and that you have some sort of belief that Richard Stallman is infallible.
It's a trope (Richard Stallman was right, as usual), that I was intentionally paying homage to. Genuinely sorry if it annoyed you that much, certainly wasn't my attention. I really have no feelings one way or another towards Stallman, other than being amused at his hit rate on these type of predictions that people mock him for.
If the phone's off, that's going to be less useful. And the tower-tracking location granularity's much lower than GPS Though I don't know what the reporting intervals are. Some smartphones (or their apps) were reporting location data every 10 seconds, with accuracy measured within a few feet.
Can't find that article at the moment, though another reports that location information is logged "at least several times an hour":
Here: "In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times."
Except in certain situations when you're probably pretty lucky to have it on.
I had a friend who ran off the side of a mountain in Colorado. He called 911, but had no idea where he was (he was from the Midwest). Within about 40 minutes, they had triangulated his location and had a tow truck and emergency vehicles routed to get him out.
Without his phone and the ability to locate him, he was pretty sure he wouldn't have made.
If he's called 911 then ipso facto 1) his phone is on and 2) all location features are activated (on pretty much any phone of recent memory), as dialing 911 enables just this.
The fact that the exception proves useful doesn't mean my phone should transmit and the telco provider, app manufacturers, and others record, possibly indefinitely my location data every few seconds.
If you haven't read Maciej Cegłowski "The Internet with a Human Face", do. It's quite simply one of the best and most completely cogent arguments against the advertising-supported services model I've seen ever and anywhere. He's "idlewords" here on HN.
While it is obvious that turning off the phone helps, it's good that you make that point as I cannot remove the battery from my smartphone, a problem most "dumb" phones don't have.
>It's still really hard to get around the privacy invasions of a smartphone, though. I'd like something without GPS...
I have only ever wished for the opposite, an app/feature that will log my location, frequently. I don't particularly care if it's stored in the cloud, as long as it's also stored on something of mine in a portable format (CSV, etc). I am thinking of this in terms of potentially catastrophic events where proving my location at some given time would be incredibly helpful, say, when the spouse/boss/police need to know, and the stakes are risking my marriage/job/freedom. Even more helpful would be if the app integrated with the fingerprint reader, to help prove that not only was my phone at this location, but with very high probability, so was I.
Why are people so interested in destroying this information about themselves? Is it "because freedom"? Or is there a real, practical threat that we open ourselves to when this information is out there? I am genuinely interested in knowing.
