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Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249387.

haha here's the irony on ad tracking-- what's safer to direct traffic to: the eff or 404media.co?

The full title is:

> The Government Uses Targeted Advertising to Track Your Location. Here's What We Need to Do.

It's never popular when I post this, but I'm just going to do it again:

"No matter the risk, I must carry my smartphone everywhere and install every app. It would be unimaginable to have the urge to look something up, but then wait to do it later until I'm using a real computer. No negative outcome will EVER shake my deep, permanent need to carry a smartphone all the time and use it for as much as possible."

We've done this to ourselves, and we're terrified at even the most minor inconvenience. It's something I can't wrap my head around, but people cannot bear to just wait until they get home to query something on the internet. They MUST have access ALL THE TIME, no matter the downside. It's baffling.

They MUST have access ALL THE TIME, no matter the downside.

The problem is that the downside is incredibly small (government isn't interested in most citizens) until it's suddenly massive (government is interested in you.) That makes it very difficult for people to build a mental model of why it's a problem: because in all seriousness it genuinely isn't unless you're either fighting the system, you're a criminal, or you have a level of perception where you can understand that other people are a threat to the government and you have empathy for them or you can see that the government might see you as a threat to in the future. Most people can't or won't understand about that.

You can't really blame them. Mobile devices are useful beyond 'looking stuff up'. Maps, communication, banking, etc are huge upsides to counter the probably very small (if you ignore empathy) downside for most people.

Im probably to last person to defend the entire stack that is the smart phone but this feels a little reductionist.

I use mine as a phone, messaging, podcast player, camera, a banking device, a little email and occastionally the web. Thats it. Some convience is good, too much is very bad. No social media or whatever millions of apps they constantly try to push in your store of (enforced) choice.

In someways we have done this ourselves but also there is a deeper societal issue. As Ellule and Kacsynski both pointed out, technology is voluntary to a point. But when it becomes a tool that you are practially forced to use to merely keep up with others, it is no longer a choice unless you can figure a way without it at your own peril.

For instance my bank has become entirely dependent of their app as the glue between all their functions and authorisation. I can try to avoid this but it becomes very difficult, it goes beyond just convenience at that point. I do not like that at all, I think it is very short term thinking, but here we are.

I try to avoid a lot of various technologies were I can make it work, I do not have a car for that reason, but smartphones have unfortunately become very ingrained in societies expectations at a blinding pace. Try to limit their use were you can, maybe others will follow.

>For instance my bank has become entirely dependent of their app as the glue between all their functions and authorisation

That sounds horrible. What are users to do if their smartphone breaks?

In my case a few weeks back when my phone failed, it meant no access over the weekend until I could get a very lengthy phone call to reinstate app access on a new phone.

It's a false dichotomy. Citizens can have useful smartphones while not being tracked by unwanted actors.

Not with modern cellular and Wi-Fi tech we can't. Base stations literally “steer the beam” to follow you. Precise location spying is essential to the way they achieve such high throughput.

Of course we can, these are all non physical properties of the universe. We can design things to not enable tracking or advertising, we just don't because the public isn't allowed to provide public solutions so we're forced to use malware by corporations that profit off of the malware.

Do people seriously forget that humans design with an explicit purpose? That purpose can change you know...

edit: needs to be stated that the last data privacy law the US passed was regarding video rentals in the 80s.

we can't have privacy for mail contents. the post network literally "routes the package" via the address on the box. digging through your mail is essential to the way they achieve such delivery rates

Unfortunately also correct: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-ma...

“Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States”

We Await Silent Tristero's Empire

That's different. That's only tracking to a granularity of a postally recognized address. News flash, that address isn't you. It's somewhere you probably are at some point, but it isn't you. Cellular network tracking and surveillance on the other hand... You can't really get around that problem without everything being designed with store & forward in mind.

You're missing the point. Just because it's possible for that tracking to happen, it doesn't mean it has to happen. We could have strong privacy laws. Mobile carriers (and anyone else) could be required to not store this data at all, or at the very least delete it after a short time. We could have mandated surprise audits to ensure this actually happens. We could have significant, company-ending fines for non-compliance.

We don't, and that sucks. But it's not a binary choice between "you can carry your phone everywhere" or "you can avoid having your movements stored in a database indefinitely". There are other options that we as a society could choose, if we could get our acts together.

Sure, the opsec ideal is that you don't have to trust other parties in the first place. But honestly, for the vast majority of people, that sort of thing doesn't matter, and having strong, readily-enforced privacy laws would be more than sufficient to keep people safe and secure.

One problem is that such information can be useful for non surveillance purposes, for example: how they knew certain roads were congested before GPS was the mobile networks. I personally do not see anything nefarious about this, nor would I necessarily wish to see this kind of information as uncollectable. Such things are different from tracking specific individuals, yes, but it's not that different. It then becomes a matter of what, how much, and for what purposes the information can be collected, which can be somewhat moot since the government in all likelihood will give themselves an opt out anyway.

None of this is to say that we shouldn't try, or that it's futile, but rather that it's a daunting task: the only way to really defeat this is to not only regulate private entities but also the government itself. And the only way to do that is to make such surveillance political suicide. And the only way to do that is to get the people to care about privacy. Here in the UK, the public has more or less come to accept CCTV cameras being everywhere, with the government now introducing AI face-scanning cameras, which has not been met with much public resistance. And so I do have to echo what @everdrive said: "We've done this to ourselves". Whether it's about convenience or apathy or whatever, we've had the means to object to this and we haven't.

This confuses a technology used for the purpose of optimizing the performance of a technology with tracking for the purposes of selling you crap or keeping tabs on your location for unwarranted reasons. Huge difference. The former does not entail the latter.

Actually it is physically impossible to have any wireless comms at all without giving away a unique identity that can be tracked. Not unless you're going to replace your phone's radio every time you send some data. Every single transmitter has a unique fingerprint that can be identified relatively easily. It's called Specific Emitter Identification. If at any point a fingerprint is associated with your identity, it's trivial for a state actor to know exactly who and where you are every time your phone transmits something. They don't have to know what you're sending. The electromagnetic spectrum is not a private medium.

How things are aren’t the only way things could be.

A receiver could use a new random ID to call “collect” to a secure third party network which agrees to pay for the base stations bandwidth for every connection. The station then responds to the base station yep ID X’s bandwidth will be paid by vert tel.

Obviously, this doesn’t eliminate the possibility of tracking as you’d want the cell to have multiple connections created and abandoned randomly, but it does remove that ID you’re concerned with.

GP is referring to manufacturing variance in the radio equipment, not the deliberately-inserted tracking identifiers. See, for example, doi:10.1016/j.dsp.2025.105201 and doi:10.3390/rs17152659 for relatively cheap approaches.

The solution to this is just to make it illegal to store and process the results of such analysis applied to radio signals, without consent of the data subject (GDPR jurisdictions have that already), and to enforce that law.

Intentional noise can obstruct that signal. Which should be obvious from a pure information theory perspective, if you can extract more information from a transmission to identify the radio a transmitter could modulate that to carry information.

Even going to the extreme of a friendly jammer producing a countersignal is only enough to fool the bottom end of hobbyists. The only thing you can do to stop SEI to a certainty is to trash a radio after you've used it once. It's an unsolvable problem outside of that, and known as such for decades.

I’ve read papers saying otherwise. In real world conditions when you’re trying to track moving transmitters, we are talking about an extremely difficult to detect signal and you’re trying to accurately identify an extremely large number of devices.

You're confusing a technical limitation with a policy decision. Just because the cell tower (as currently designed) needs to know your fairly-precise location at all times, it doesn't mean that location needs to be stored indefinitely or used against you.

We could live in a world where we have strictly-enforced privacy laws. We don't, and that sucks, and if anything, we're moving further away from that state of affairs very day. But we could.

I'm not confusing anything. I'm saying that even if you completely eliminated the latter, your privacy will still be compromised by the former. When “The Government” is the entity wanting to know where you are, it doesn't matter which private company they compel to participate. They will just go for the path of least resistance, and as long as your location data is recorded by something, somewhere, they will get it.

> They will just go for the path of least resistance, and as long as your location data is recorded by something, somewhere, they will get it.

There is the real problem. It’s not a tech issue. It’s a people problem. Most governments don’t actually _respect_ and _serve_ their people. They see them as cattle to be monitored and manipulated.

> No matter the risk

People don’t necessarily know the risk. Some do, and as someone on HackerNews you are in a space of such people who are more likely to know, but I don’t think the average person knows just how deep risks go.

> We've done this to ourselves, and we're terrified at even the most minor inconvenience

> It's baffling.

> I am quite angry and perplexed at why people have backed themselves into this corner

I don’t think this framing is quite right. It puts the onus of the problem onto the people and solely frames it as something people do, leaving out anything else. I don’t know if that’s how you meant it, but that’s how it comes off.

It’s baffling that people would push themselves into the corner because that’s not the full story. At least in part, they are being pushed into that corner; it’s not just something they do but something being done to them.

That’s what marketing, and at least some aspects of design, are. A company wants people to know about and use their product, and they want people to keep on using their product. Taken farther along, this leads to desires becoming needs or addictions. This can happen with many technologies, products, etc., phones included.

I don’t think it’s as baffling that people are drawn towards using a product excessively when there are millions to billions of dollars alongside time and effort put towards getting people to go down that path

You are worried about THAT?

How about we carry a device with multiple cameras, multiple microphones, and 24x7 connection to the internet that is running an operating system made by an Ad Company, to the most private of places?

It does not have to be that way however. There are plenty of phones out there running free/libre operating systems, including GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and various Linux options. I use GrapheneOS and wouldn't carry a phone running a proprietary OS.

On the toilet as I'm typing this

I think many people don't know about the issue at hand; and many also don't care.

The more tragic thing is that those who care about it, can not do much about it.

You act like looking random facts up is the only thing we do on phones. My phone is a personal computer, I use it to navigate through the world, work, access my bank accounts and other personal information, and communicate with others. And yes, sometimes these can't wait the 10–15 hours I might not be at home.

There's also the possibility that we, as consumers, demand that the political system solves this issue with robust privacy legilsation that prohibits any entity from tracking our phones.

Not all political systems respond to consumer demand.

Democratic ones do. But for 95% of causes it's hard to become so loud that they are forced to respond.

That's exactly why orgs like EFF exist. Most laws also aren't passed because of overwhelming consumer feedback. It's lobbied by special interests. Which sadly took a negative connotation over the last few decades, but lobbies can be for the people too.

Studies show if 0% of the American population support a bill, it's 30% likely to be passed, and if 100% of the American population support it, it's 30% likely to be passed. Is America democratic?

I'm getting to the point where I believe representative democracy on the scale of hundreds of millions of people just doesn't work all that well. I've never been one of those "states' rights" people, but these days I am becoming convinced that the US should have a much smaller federal government, and states, counties, cities, and towns should have more autonomy in deciding their fates.

This is not an easy problem to solve. Certainly I want more things at the federal level than the authors of the constitution envisioned (currency, international diplomacy, military, etc.): some things really need to be done at the national level (like environmental regulation).

Anyway. Sure, those figures may be true for the US Congress (or not, I haven't verified), but I bet you those figures aren't even close to true for town and city councils and county government. And perhaps not even state government as well.

We could also demand that the government doesn't use the location data from private companies without a warrant, but elections aren't often granular enough to satisfy individual requirements. Better to figure out a way to create and use a competitor that doesn't do this to you.

Why don't you "demand" a pony while you're at it?

>There's also the possibility that we, as consumers, demand that the political system solves this issue

This will never happen, but good luck.

do you think that's any less likely than a mass boycott of all smartphone usage by the public?

> It would be unimaginable to have the urge to look something up,

It's not popular because this is very reductive and dismissive of the problem almost to the point of dishonesty. Many modern functions need an application and there is little or no alternative.

Some examples:

QR codes - lots of restaurants don't have a physical menu and need a QR code scan. This behavior extends well beyond restaurants as well.

Keys - Lots of cars support lock/unlock and put a ton of features behind an app. While not strictly necessary, it's incredibly convenient if you're in the inevitable (and sometimes very expensive/difficult to remediate) situation everyone eventually faces when you lose your keys, or lock them in the car. Some garages and apartment complexes only support getting in by app, and I've seen this in hotels as well.

Banking - doing many things at banks nowadays requires confirming you are you via push notification to your phone. Lots of MFA is app-based as well. I could not do my job without a phone.

Navigation - I don't always carry a garmin or thomas guide around with me when I'm walking around an unfamiliar city, and it would be pretty ridiculous of me to do so.

Probably could come up with a lot of other things. Without a phone it's not really possible to function in much of the modern world. There is more to the app ecosystem than tiktok, maybe that's the miss here.

>QR codes

Those restaurants are worthless

>Keys

Carrying your car key does not count as inconvenient

>Banking

Agreed, and this is a problem, but you can just do your banking at home without carrying around your smart phone. This is a case where the industry is forcing a choice on consumers. I'm considering joining a local credit union for this reason.

> Navigation

How did people manage this prior to 2007?

> > Navigation

> How did people manage this prior to 2007?

We had a map for each county. My wife would switch them when we crossed county boundaries and would give directions. We still got lost. It was romantic.

> How did people manage this prior to 2007?

MapQuest? It sucked.

Google Maps does allow you to download areas to your device that can be used offline, too.

Paper maps before that. If you were in AAA you could get a "trip map" that was a complete route with turn by turn directions and a spiral bound, printed map that you paged through as you traveled, but paper maps worked well. Not as convenient as a phone but not terrible either.

The AAA maps are pretty great. I keep one of their spiral bound maps of my region in my trunk just in case.

> How did people manage this prior to 2007?

You just looked at a map. People used to be good at looking at maps, and remembering cardinal directions prior to GPS units. We have unfortunately lost that sense of natural direction.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32545974

This is goalpost shifting and ignored much of the point of my post. this same thinking can be applied recursively to “well, if you cant do that, it’s just dumb anyway.”

And you’re flat out wrong about banking, there are things and situations that require you physically entering one. And yes it is a situation where society is forcing the decision, that’s my entire point - I as an individual cannot apply the non remedy of “just do everything on your computer, ldo” because society has stripped that choice from me. unless the prescription you’re giving is to withdraw from society - which is only proving my point.

I’d also hardly describe my job as a minor inconvenience.

I see these types of arguments a lot on this site and I am very confused where they are coming from. It’s almost like the implication is you have no right to complain about the privacy nightmare if you participate in using things that are necessary to participate in society. You can have reasonable privacy and these tools at the same time, it’s not an impossibility.

I appreciate the response, and I would argue that in at least some cases “well, if you cant do that, it’s just dumb anyway.” is totally valid.

With regard to the job, and the banking, I agree. I need to have OTP on my phone and I haven't tried to bank in person for a while. We have two young kids, and once things calm down I'm going to see if we can swap to a local credit union. The decision will be predicated on whether I can do everything in person.

With regard to the phone, I think the softer version of my argument would be that you can install the bare minimum number of apps, and otherwise just set the phone on a table and not carry it around with you. If you're worried about government tracking, power your phone off when you drive to work. Your work itself (and all your logins) will reveal your location, so it's not really as if powering your phone back on once you get to work is much of a detriment. The same is true for banking. Even if you must use the smartphone, just leave the phone off / or in airplane mode and then just do the banking at your desk at home.

In fairness to you, I'm pretty sure I failed a job interview once because I asked if I needed a smartphone for the job. I think my point would be that with the way things are going, it's becoming more and more important to figure out how to avoid as much of the smartphone as possible.

> The decision will be predicated on whether I can do everything in person.

I don't want to do everything in person. It's frankly amazing that I can deposit a check on my phone, from my home, and don't have to go to a bank branch to deposit it anymore. For close to 20 years now, my primary banking has been through banks that don't have a physical presence at all, let alone in my city. And I don't mind it that way at all; in fact I like it, because these banks focus harder on making things more convenient for me.

Your attitude here seems to be that if other people's preferred method for doing something doesn't conform to your preferred method, then the other people must be wrong somehow. That's not a reasonable way to be looking at this.

My credit union still offers walk-in or drive-thru in-person service for everything.

> How did people manage this prior to 2007?

Paper maps. Or even (in the earlier 00s) looking up directions on MapQuest or whatever, and then printing those directions out. I don't want to keep printing out directions; what a huge waste of paper that would be. Paper maps are doable, but awkward to use, and can easily become out of date. You need to have addresses (or at least nearby landmarks or cross-streets) for everywhere you want to go, because paper maps have a very limited set of points-of-interest on them.

> Those restaurants are worthless

That's just, like, your opinion, man. Your criticisms seem to mostly amount to "people should just abandon the various conveniences and niceties that smartphones provide, because there are alternatives, even in cases where those alternatives are incredibly inconvenient".

Yes, it's idiotic that we're subjected to so much tracking when we carry our phones around. But the response shouldn't be "let's just become a luddite and not take advantage of modern technology". It should be "wow, this makes me fucking angry; we need to fix our laws so this sort of thing doesn't happen".

> QR codes: haha agreed. those QR codes coincide with mandatory post covid tip rate and inflated prices; whenever I tip it's 15-18% cash, and direct to waiter. i don't eat at places that invest in insta (food for the eyes) instead of real food.

> keys + mfa: this one is a tricky one for me. thinking to go do web-only mfa fwiw and go full RMS with just a laptop and a hotspot. does he even use a hotspot? haha. as far as SMS MFA goes... maybe tailscale out an adb session to your real cellphone at home. feels brittle, but so is sms mfa. edit: actually i'll just forward SMS to myself via e-mail; this is what your financial advisor does, since SMS is heavily regulated in fintech

> nav: yeah when smartphones first came out i just hated every design aspect about them (stupidly fragile screens at the time), but the most compelling reason to switch at the time was navigation. i don't mind printing mapquest again or just using a dedicated gps.

it's the value prop of having "all the world's knowledge at your fingertips" versus:

stupid obsoletion practices + lithium mining, corpogovernment surveillance + tracking, eroding mental health, porn, gacha games, cellphone thumb + turtle neck, doom scrolling + time wasted, enshittified content, the reverse flynn-effect, infuriating typing ux on both ios and android, and people having near constant access to you at all times (remember when it was rude to call past 8p?)

does this thing really make you happy?

that i think it's time to just leave your phone at home...like in ye olde days with your landline and i'm an app developer. (you should keep the phone and gps on and at least pretend that you're a normie).

anyone in construction really like their ruggedized SIP phone and can recommend a good voip system (ie they trust their voip provider) with e2e encryption that I can connect a wifi 6 mobile router to? someone a few months ago on hn mentioned the mudi v2 and sim swapping with https://github.com/srlabs/blue-merle

Just one more example here, which I think is a big one for some people - chat apps. Without Whatsapp, Telegram, and Signal, I can't really use my phone as telecommunications tool with friends and colleagues, because everyone is on them. The group chats are where a lot of discussion happens, so I can't just switch to SMS/calls.

funny. i actually woke up this morning fairly early and bustling alive with ideas (oh you know, nonsense 5am ones like what i should do if the petrodollar collapses... trade eggs and make a fiat cryptocurrency internal to my company (not subject to oversight) based on favors? wax tokens melted after favors met... something or another.

and i noted that urge to check my phone to validate those (later midday: embarrassing) ideas. it occurred to me then that it's precisely that urge to check the phone that usually kills them. and if it isn't that, it's the missed smses and emails and the latest gripe on hn. i wondered how many good ideas were strangled with the mundanity/viciousness (depending on your algorithm) of this device

"is it really so bad to sit alone with my thoughts, without having an immediate answer to put them to rest?"

For whom are you speaking? It certainly isn't me. My phone plan shares 3 lines on a single 2gb of data/month. I'd have to pay more for even the current base plan, but I don't feel like it. This is because the mobile experience is worse in almost every way.

But that's a moot point, because advertisers will still track you on any device you use.

Fun fact, generalisations can still exist even if they don't 100% apply to literally everybody.

I have access ALL THE TIME…

…to a Field Notes book in my wallet (and a pen).

I agree with you, but at the same time: we shouldn't have to worry about this. We should be able to have nice things. We should be able to live our lives how we want (within reason) and not have to worry about our own government spying on us and tracking our every movement.

The response to revelations about this sort of tracking should not be to roll our eyes at people who carry their phones everywhere. It should be to get angry at our government for treating us all like potential criminals, and vote out shitheads who support this sort of thing. (Which I know feels damn-near impossible most of the time...)

This is funny because one of my major gripes with everyone having phones is they don't really use them for meaningful information seeking. They'll sit in conversation and speculate and invent nonsense, accept the smartest/most convenient sounding nonsense at the table, and move on as if they did not have the ability to look it up on the spot. Then later they quote the nonsense to someone else as if it were something they learned as opposed to made up with one of their social circles.

Yeah this is a good point. It would probably be a good idea to have an elective in high school/collage class on the recommended using of mobile tech and why its a concern to to using it to doomscroll because the algorithms are gaming your attention and trying to steer your perception.

Not me so much as my work and the crappy job search requiring you to be responsive at all times. Add in family if you have one.

I don't think this is right. Most people are just not that curious, so there's no drive to be able to look things up.

People don't want to be bored, so a phone with all the apps provides a reliable source of distraction/entertainment.

Also the fact that most people (the vast majority even) will never be affected by having their location data shared so they just don't care, myself included.

> It's never popular when I post this

That's because you're coming off holier than thou and condescending. Anyone who understands gadgets will say phones are highly trackable and will have told anyone that well over 10+ years ago. It's a trade off of value. Corporations/gov can track me while I have my phone, but turn by turn directions, maps and a camera while wandering around are useful. We could legislate that traceability away in the US to an extent, but that would require our gov be working and right now it is not.

I'm probably going to delete my HN account soon. I'm so disenfranchised with the direction technology is going that I'm finding it really heard to be civil and constructive here. I'm not trying to be sanctimonious, but I am quite angry and perplexed at why people have have backed themselves into this corner.

I hope you don't go! It's clearly a minority position you hold, but that doesn't mean it's a bad one. Or wrong. I've been perplexed by this and many other related issues. I wonder and hope every year, every step in the wrong direction that gets attention, we'll get to that magic 3% that stands up and corrects things for citizen good. No matter how your up or down votes end up in a few hours, know you aren't alone or wrong. At least from my point of view.

People could've done a lot of things to make their lives better. Unfortunately they prefer to get "managed" with all the consequences. No matter what you cancel and where you would go you will find all the same. The fact that one know how how to write b-tree from the scratch means zilch in this department

So print off map quest and carry a disposable like in the 90s. If you don't use social media, the value proposition of a smart phone is incredibly low. I feel we peaked at mobile phones which could call and text.

>If you don't use social media, the value proposition of a smart phone is incredibly low.

Sorry but what are you using your device for? There are many, many tools I use my smartphone for and I currently don't have Insta, reddit, Facebook, typical social media, etc on my device. Dismissing a pocket sized computer with far reaching access to the internet as a low value proposition is misguided. If all you use your device for is social media, call and text that's really too bad and a complete misunderstanding of what those devices are capable of.

Encrypted messaging like Signal and Briar is so much more accessible thanks to smartphones. People who would've never touched GPG can get a lot of its benefits thanks to smartphone apps.

(Which doesn't mean we have to give in to big corporations. Gotta love GrapheneOS!)