Trigger alert. The following subject matter is for those who understand that the Watercooler is a place where worldly topics get discussed sometimes. Please discontinue reading if the Watercooler is not the place you want to be. Thank you in advance.
Still here? OK:
When I was in Malaysia recently, there was building construction underway, where there were many scraps of metal lying around. Monks are allowed to take cast-off things without breaking Vinaya. I used one of these cast-off scraps to build a makeshift Faraday box (with the help of one of the stewards/kappiyas there). Radio signals cannot pass through metal. This is the āAirplane modeā that your smartphone truly deserves:
This is an aluminum box that took about 1 hour to hack together. The construction material used is called āAluminum flashingā, which can be cut with tin snips.
What are you worried about Google getting, Venerable? Do you think they are going to whisk you away to some secret Google internment camp where they steal your robes and make you grow your hair long? Are you part of some clandestine inter-monastic network of cyber spies with a plan to zap people into the fourth jhana with your dhamma gun, so you can steal their stuff?
Generally, if network connectivity is not possible, spyware on the phone store things locally. The next time you remove the cage and connect to a network, all the collected data will be sent to the Google mothership.
Over the last 16 months, as Iāve debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, āI donāt really worry about invasions of privacy because I donāt have anything to hide.ā I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address. I say, āHereās my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is youāre doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if youāre not a bad person, if youāre doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide.ā Not a single person has taken me up on that offer. - Glenn Greenwald in Why privacy matters - TED Talk
Say one has on oneās phone writings on childhood experience one has survivedā¦ or erotic fantasy written for oneās spouseā¦ or plans for oneās divorce or cancer treatmentā¦ or writing designed to work on oneās practiceā¦ or thoughts on how to help someone who came to you for counselingā¦ or thought experiments of any kind.
Nothing illegal, all of it probably beneficial to many beings if allowed to continue without interuption distraction intimidation or betrayal of confidences ā¦
J Edgar Hoover was gay. He kept that private. Should anyone never have the right to mental solitude???
I am thinking the Buddha would be a privacy supporter. Maybe there are references in the EBT?
The video shows that the data collection happens even if the phone is in āairplane modeā. Airplane mode presumably means that the cell phone function of the smart device is turned off. BUT as soon as you turn the cell phone back on the stored information can be transmitted.
Location information can come from several sources:
GPS ā which is built-in to most smart-phones and tablets.
Cell phone towers ā every tower has an id which can be plotted on a map. In a city a phone is getting signals from several towers at once which allows your general location to be calculated by triangulation.
Inertial navigation ā if the device knows which way you are holding it (portrait or landscape mode) then it probably has inertial sensors similar to the ones used for navigation in spacecraft, airplanes, submarines, ships and land vehicles.
More expensive GPS devices use a combination of GPS signals from satellites and inertial navigation.
None of those should be operational in airplane modeā¦
Yup, most mobile do have gyroscopes in them, and the are pretty well known quantity (millions of them built and shipped).
Which explains why Google could work out when someone is in a car (based on the acceleration, length etc) and can now when you are walking, sitting or lying downā¦
And you canāt turn that off.
If you sample the gyro 60 times per seconds assuming it provides a 2 bytes reading from the 3 axis you collect at most ~1.24 MiB per hour.
And thatās raw data, and itās very easy to compress it because a lot of time the reading will be pretty much the same.
So, I guess the best option if you want to be free from such trouble is to leave the phone home. Because the gyro will still work in your pocket and box - no escape no matter how strong the mobile phone tin-foil hat is .
It makes sense for a āairplane modeā to only turn off functions in the mobile device that use a radio transmitter.
GPS only requires a receiver. GPS may or may not be disabled, because it does not involve transmitting radio waves.
I checked my Android phone and I see that you can disable localisation at a global level (it immediately complains that no app using localisation will work)), but this is not part of the airplane modeā¦
Yes, you just need to receive, so it doesnāt need to be off in airplane mode. I have a Russian friend who told me that he once switched on his GPS navigation app while in an airplane. According to him, he got a severe telling off:
āYou are travelling at 900 km/hour! You are speeding!ā
He stored his personal digital assistant, a device that acts as a GPS, in an empty foil packet of Twisties, a puffy cheese-based snack that is the equivalent of American Cheetos.
Just because a software claims to do something doesnāt mean it actually does so. This is especially true of closed-source/proprietary software. Case in point, Windows 10 pretty much ignores the privacy switches you set and continues to send data to Microsoft servers including keystrokes:
Closed-source/non-free/proprietary software is loyal to itās proprietors, not to the user.
Android phones may use most of the somewhat-free linux kernel but almost all the telecom firmware (wi-fi, carrier radio, gps receiver, etc) is non-free and closed meaning we really have no idea how it is programmed to behave.
. So I travel lght when Iām not going far (which I rarely do nowadays).
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