[IP] Ignorance is the opposite of bliss
Begin forwarded message:
From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: January 28, 2006 5:05:39 AM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Dave:
The (UK) Guardian has a regular feature entitled "Bad Science" - a
serious column, usually an analysis of recently-published allegedly-
scientific news stories. However today's column is about popular fear
of science, and gives as an example of an unpleasant use of new
technology a way of surreptitiously tracking mobile phone users that
I at least had not heard of before. You may want it for IP.
Cheers
Brian
Ignorance is the opposite of bliss
Ben Goldacre
Saturday January 28, 2006
The Guardian
I spend a lot of my time wondering: why are people so afraid of
science, when it has given us so much? To my mind there are two
answers: firstly, the everyday science that you learned at school
is no longer enough to understand the world around you. Fifty years
ago, a fairly well educated person could easily have a full
understanding of how the technology they interacted with actually
worked . . .
But that's not true any more. Look around you. Do you really, fully
understand your mobile phone? The braking system on your car? Where
your breakfast came from? Or even the manufacturing process that
produced this bit of newspaper? My guess is no. Any sufficiently
advanced technology, as they say, is indistinguishable from magic,
and these days, with the pace of new developments, that goes even
for people who know a lot about science. And that's spooky. We
don't like that, either intellectually, or in our gut.
. . . This week, I noticed a glaring flaw in the mobile phone
networks that allows you to stalk people, and find their location
to within 200 yards, any time you want, without their permission.
You don't have to be Einstein; there are websites all over the
internet to do this.
Here is how it works. You register on the site, pay a few quid,
type in the phone number of the person you want to track, and then
the system sends them a text message. All you need to do is
surreptitiously get access to your target's mobile phone, without
their knowledge, for just five minutes: long enough to receive that
text message, reply with the word LOCATE, and delete two text
messages that arrive immediately, warning them they are being
tracked. You can stalk them for a couple of days, find out if they
really are where they say they are, work out who they are with,
perhaps find out if they're having an affair, then delete them off
the system. They will never be any the wiser.
I asked my girlfriend if I could, in principle, track her for a
day, without telling her how: she agreed and I set the service up
on her phone, in five minutes, while she was asleep. I have a map
of her movements in front of me right now. It feels very wrong. And
it required no technical knowledge, or "hacking", whatsoever. That
this is possible, and so easy, to my mind, is extremely sinister. I
had a squabble with one of these companies on Radio 4 yesterday,
and they seemed astonished at what I was saying. They promised that
they would tighten up security, and think about getting better
consent for tracking people's location than one response to a text
message. The notion that this technology could be misused in this
way had not, apparently, occurred to them. It took me to point it
out to them. Who the hell am I? Nobody. Do I work for a phone
company? Do I work for the government?
In that moment, I can honestly say, I felt the fear that so many
people feel with technology. I don't fully understand how mobile
phones work. But now I know that anybody can use them to track
people, without their permission, I share that uneasy sense that
everything is, somehow, out of control ...
Full story at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,,1696910,00.html
--
School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon
Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxx PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/
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