Location Privacy Protocols, was Re: GPS trail - crazy idea

Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wolfgang.rupprecht+gnus200707 at gmail.com
Fri Jul 6 21:08:32 CEST 2007


Al Johnson
<openmoko at mazikeen.demon.co.uk> writes:
> At the moment the telcos don't seem to be making their subscribers' locations 
> freely available. If they did I would probably keep my phone turned off until 
> I needed it, because I don't trust everybody to be nice. Location-based 
> marketing would be annoying. A thief being able to check I was away before 
> breaking into my house would be worse.

Off as in the soft-off button being pressed or the battery being
removed?  ;-) 

Sufficiently evil phone firmware could take periodic timestamped GPS
readings even if the phone were off.  The past readings could be saved
for later download.  It would be interesting to know how the
government deals with that threat itself (say the FBI taking folks to
safe-houses etc).

Another good reason from an open-source product.  Maybe there is a
vast untapped market for selling open-source phones to the governments
of the world (to protect them from the other governments of the
word. ;-))

-wolfgang





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