Mobile Phone Contact Tracking

[MaxNg]

My wife tends to be rather a conspiracy theorist at times, and believes that Covid 19 tracking Apps on mobile phones would mean that all who use them could be much more easily tracked by "the authorities" than "back in the day, pre-Covid."

I believe that if the security services, police etc wish to track your mobile phone, they can already do so, and whether you have a Covid-19 App or not will make little difference.

Without revealing "State Secrets", what are your thoughts on this?

[T6 vanman]

Sit down with her and Box Set binge "The Hunted" from Channel 4

[Baldchap]

T6 vanman said:

Sit down with her and Box Set binge "The Hunted" from Channel 4

That really irritated me. The only reason they looked on things like cash point video was because they knew (from the camera team) to do so.

[Baldchap]

MaxNg said:

My wife tends to be rather a conspiracy theorist at times, and believes that Covid 19 tracking Apps on mobile phones would mean that all who use them could be much more easily tracked by "the authorities" than "back in the day, pre-Covid."

I believe that if the security services, police etc wish to track your mobile phone, they can already do so, and whether you have a Covid-19 App or not will make little difference.

Without revealing "State Secrets", what are your thoughts on this?

My company is very much in the information security sector, the majority of which these days is electronic. Fact is, if you carry a smartphone, and especially if you use social media, without specific steps being taken by the user no such app is required for a multitude of organisations to already do all of the above. In most cases they don't need to put any effort in whatsoever because people already share their entire lives and locations willingly with every app they install and every 'service' they use.

There are a number of really good reads on Social Engineering through technology that would (or certainly should) change how people use technology and what they share, plus the documentary 'The Creepy Line' (on Netflix FOC) is very interesting regarding the ethics of the likes of Google and Facebook.

Edited by Baldchap on Wednesday 13th May 12:00

[Zetec-S]

As above really.

How many people getting paranoid about Covid-19 tracking apps read through the T&C's every time they download a new app? Social media, Tesco Clubcard, Alexa, simple internet cookies, etc etc.

What do they think "the authorities" are going to do with the data? Other than sell it? (Or lose it?) But most people have already given it away dozens of times so does it make much difference.

We don't live in a police state so they really couldn't give a st about tracking someone's personal whereabouts. Most people are really not that interesting.

[sociopath]

I had a meeting with EE a few years ago when they were trying to sell some services, they know where every handset is that's in their network, purely by the fact that its linked to a mast.

A crappy little Bluetooth covid-19 app isn't going to be providing anything as informative, and certainly nothing they don't already know.

[tgr]

It's not so much tracking a single person since, as has been said, most people aren't interesting. The data only becomes useful and important when it's combined with everyone else's data to form a picture.

But I also agree that that ship sailed long ago

[deggles]

Yep, if you carry a mobile phone it’s pretty much a given that you can be found/tracked. I contracted for a UK mobile phone network more than a decade ago, pre-smartphones/GPS. Even back then you could locate a device pretty accurately just using cell triangulation.

Obviously there were strict protocols to access the system, and the API developers certainly never used their privileged access to see whether the manager was on the golf course on an afternoon when he claimed to be in a meeting. No siree.

[so called]

Wasn't there a terrorist attack a few years ago and the authorities tracked one of the suspects by following his phone to Italy.

If you don't want to be tracked leave your phone at home.

[tight fart]

The “The creepy line” is Amazon prime.

[tangerine_sedge]

GuiriGuiriGuiri said:

Well, quite, but there's a difference between data that shows your phone has connected to a mast and the contents of your phonebook/message history/all other data like this. Presumably downloading an app that will access this information (it is literally the purpose of the app) can tell you a lot more or it'd be a fairly fruitless endeavour.

But they're not capturing that information. The only data they are getting is :

Your post code sector, i.e. SW1
Your phone make and model
An anonymised set of phones (people) that you have been near.

They don't know where you are, who you are, or who you meet. They can make intelligent guesses, but if they really cared, then they would just get a warrant and do it properly.

[steveatesh]

Been a long time since I worked in the police but even then it was possible to pinpoint a location (well, within a small area) by triangulating mast data.

However, the safeguard was in place that it needed a Supt authority to the relevant person in the mobile provider before it could be done. I only ever knew it being done for missing people and that was only if absolutely necessary, ie vulnerable, possible victim of serious crime etc.

I doubt the COVID app will make much difference to the security services being able to track you if they have cause, suggest your mrs doesnt visit terrorist web sites and the like

[MaxNg]

Don't think my wife will be visiting terrorist websites. She usually has a rant about something at breakfast time. The other day, smart phone security/tracking was the one that motivated my starting this thread.

To go slightly off track from the thread, I'm surprised that the government believe that an NHS contractor can produce a Covid-tracking app that will be more effective than one produced by the combined brains of two trillion-dollar companies - Google and Apple. And for a trial area: the Isle of Wight!!?. i believe it has a relatively elderly population who are unlikely to have new-ish smart phones.