What Location Tracking Looks Like. Your cell phone company knows everywhere you go, twenty-four hours a day, every day. How concrete is this fact for you? It's very concrete for Malte Spitz, a German politician and privacy advocate. He used German privacy law — which, like the law of many European countries, gives individuals a right to see what private companies know about them — to force his cell phone carrier to reveal what it knew about him. The result?
This profile reveals when Spitz walked down the street, when he took a train, when he was in an airplane. To show just how extensive this data is, Spitz chose to make it all available to the public; Zeit Online used it to prepare a remarkable interactive map, which animates Spitz's movements, moment by moment, over the course of half a year. A report in the New York Times on Saturday described the data release, which it called "astounding", and put it in a U.S. context, quoting EFF's Kevin Bankston. Data Protection - Datenschutz - Digital - ZEIT ONLINE. Betrayed by our own dataMobile phones are tracking devices that reveal much about our lives. One look at our interactive map of data provided by the Green party politician Malte Spitz shows why. Nuclear plants in your neighbourhoodHow many people live near a nuclear power plant in Germany? How many people lives within a radius of 20 kilometres? PISA based Wealth ComparisonHow do families live these days?
ZEIT ONLINE analyzed and visualized the data OECD's comprehensive world education ranking report, PISA 2009. A United States of Europe? Germans are dividedA survey by ZEIT ONLINE has found that Britons are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of a federal European superstate. (pdf) GeoSlavery Jerome E. Dobson and Peter F. Fisher. Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union » Judge: No Difference Between Cell Phone Tracking and GPS Vehicle Tracking. A few weeks ago, we wrote about United States v. Maynard, a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit requiring the government to obtain a warrant when it uses a GPS tracking device to monitor someone's movements.
Last Friday, Judge James Orenstein in the Eastern District of New York recognized that Maynard's reasoning also applies when the government tries to retrace a person's whereabouts using historical cell phone location information stored by cell phone carriers. Judge Orenstein rejected each possible factual difference between GPS vehicle tracking and historical cell phone tracking, and concluded that cell phone tracking is just as intrusive to Americans' reasonable expectations of privacy in the details of their everyday lives as GPS tracking. We believe that Judge Orenstein got it exactly right. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. GeoEye Wins $3.8 Billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency EnhancedView Award – Earth Imagery Featured in Article « High Resolution Imagery. Home - Mark Monmonier. Virtual prisons: how e-maps are curtailing our freedom - opinion. ELECTRONIC maps are arguably the quintessential innovation of 20th-century cartography.
Although a few academic cartographers accord the map mystical powers, it is merely a tool, useful for good, evil or both, which citizens can resist or constrain - up to a point. The question is not whether e-maps will restrict where we go and what we do, but to what extent. What I call "restrictive cartography" is not in itself new. Property maps are at least as old as Roman times, and boundary maps no younger than kingdoms and nation states. What is new, however, is the substantial increase in both the number and diversity of restrictive maps. Since 1900, we have used maps to exclude industry from residential neighbourhoods, ban new construction on floodplains, help delineate "historic" districts that constrain a homeowner's choice of paint colour or replacement ... Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geotagging.
(pdf) Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geo-TaggingGerald Friedland 1 Robin Sommer 1,2. Hacker can trick Google into giving out your location. A well-known hacker has revealed a rather disturbing trick that allows a ‘booby-trapped’ website to work out exactly where you are, to within a few meters. The BBC reports that Samy Kamkar, best known for his Myspace worm in 2005, discussed the technique at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas last week. Here’s how the attack works: It begins by the hacker contacting a target and persuading them to visit a specially-prepared website. He can then use Google’s location database to find the target’s whereabouts.
This is made possible because Google’s Street View cars create a database of wifi router locations as they travel around. This is meant to be a good thing as it means Google Maps and other legitimate apps can find out where you are by triangulating nearby wifi hotspots. However, Kamakar’s trick uses the data to locate you without your permission. He reportedly located one router to within nine meters of its actual position. (pdf)The Geographer in Jules RomainsDonogoo Tonka or The Miracles of Science: A Cinematographic Taleby Deborah Natsios. Website achterhaalt locatie via MAC-adres.
Nieuws - Met slechts een script op een site valt het MAC-adres van draadloze modems te achterhalen. Gekoppeld aan de Google Street View database geeft dit de fysieke locatie prijs. Hacker Samy Kamkar heeft op de Black Hat-conferentie deze interessante hack gedemonstreerd. Een speciaal geprepareerde website, dat een speciaal script van Kamkar draait, kan de locatie van nietsvermoedende bezoekers onthullen. Street View database Als iemand deze site bezoekt, geeft de pc door de uitvoer van wat Javascript-code het MAC-adres prijs van de router waarlangs die pc het internet opgaat.
Met een beetje hulp van Google valt vervolgens het fysieke 'woonadres' van die router te achterhalen. Die MAC-adressen zijn namelijk op grote schaal verzameld en gekoppeld aan geografische coördinaten door de rondrijdende auto’s van Google Street View. Op deze manier is de fysieke locatie van de router en de bezoeker vrij nauwkeurig vast te stellen, tot op zo’n 10 meter. Phishing en stalking. Chromeless Video Player. Wall Street Journal Stalkers Turn to GPS Video 8/4/2010. Judges Divided Over Growing GPS Surveillance.
Your Facebook Friends Are Watching You—Did We Just Move Closer to 1984? George Orwell’s novel 1984 begins with Winston Smith, the main character, seeing posters saying BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU. In 2010, that could be replaced with FACEBOOK IS WATCHING YOU. Or rather, YOUR FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK ARE WATCHING YOU. You and your friends can now post where you are and share this information, if you so chose. Facebook showed off the power of this new location feature at a launch event this week with a giant projection of a U.S. map showing where people were checking in just moments after Places launched. MG Siegler called it “Facebook’s Awesome Dark Knight-Esque Live Check-In Display.” But it was one of the scariest things I’ve seen. Facebook only showed people’s first names, but their databases know your last names and so much more about you.
Of course, there are many important differences. I expect we will learn over time how many users allow friends to tag you, turn Places off, or stick to the default limbo land, where most users are now. Fair point. I Can Stalk U: New Site Posts Exacts Locations of Twitter Users Posting Geotagged Photos. Remember PleaseRobMe.com? The website, which warned of the dangers in sharing your physical location online, now has a successor called I Can Stalk U. While PleaseRobMe (now shuttered) focused on how publicly broadcasting your location could alert criminals to an empty house nearby, ideal for burglarizing, the new site aims to raise awareness about the dangers of geo-tagged photos, specifically the ones shared from your smartphone to social networks like Twitter.
"Many people may be unaware that lots of smartphones geo-tag photos," explains security researcher Graham Cluley, who revealed the site via blog post today. The site itself quietly launched a few months ago to little fanfare. Geotagging, the process of adding geographical information to media files like photos and videos, is a feature commonly turned on by default in many of today's smartphones, including Apple's iPhone.
I Can Stalk U: Your Twitter Photos Reveal Where You Are, Even When You Don't Why are They Doing This? I Can Stalk U - Raising awareness about inadvertent information sharing. How do I disable this? How are you doing this? That's easy. Metadata Metadata In short, metadata is more data about data. In most common document types, embedded within a file is more information, typically hidden from casual viewing. This hidden data is used by the computer programs to provide accurate processing information, i.e. what version of software was used to create the document, how the file is encoded, and often who created it. In the case with many popular image/picture formats, the list of possible metadata is quite extensive. The metadata in images is often retained by default by desktop image processing software and many online photo storage websites.
About Geotagging The storage of location based data, in the form of Latitude and Longitude inside of images is called Geotagging; essentially tagging your photograph with the geographic location. However, most modern digital cameras do not automatically add geolocation (Latitude and Longitude) metadata to pictures. How do I disable this? Palm WebOS. Please Rob Me. Cybercasing the Joint: On the Privacy Implications of Geotagging. Facebook Places & Privacy: Both Real & Overblown Concerns. Facebook launched its mobile location feature last week, called Places, and just as the company deserves - there was intense scrutiny of the new feature's privacy settings.
It turns out that you can check-in friends as being at the same location you are in. That's a new and perhaps counter-intuitive bit of social engineering. People have been calling it a bug, a privacy violation, a crime against human decency. I don't think any of this criticism is going to hold up for long. Places has some privacy problems, but checking in other people isn't one of them. Here's what this new ability to tag other people is: it's a means to publish structured assertions about another person in a way that becomes visible to their friends because of the nature of the technology.
It's like a public reply on Twitter or a trackback between blogs, but within the safe confines of Facebook friend relationships. I know where you are... The ubiquity of smartphones with geolocation capabilities (i.e. the ability to pinpoint you on a map) means that we're now starting to add our physical location to the mass of data we hand over. Services like Foursquare and Gowalla – and now Facebook "Places", which Dominique and Alex have written about this month – encourage people to submit their location so that others (e.g. "friends") can see when there are in the vicinity (e.g. to meet up for a coffee).
Participation is encouraged through incentives such as designating an individual the "mayor" of a location that they visit more than anyone else. Location information is also handed out in less visible ways. For example, many phones now "geotag" photographs with location information, which shows not only when but also where they were taken. And, obviously, the use of store cards places you at a store at the time of use. By Andrew Tait Further reading:Location services pose huge security risks, USA Today. Foursquare privacy 101. Epic Mix - EpicMix. Nike+ Meets Gowalla in Vail Resorts App for Skiers and Snowboarders. More than just powder will be coating the mountains and chair lifts at Vail Resorts this fall. The Colorado-based company has unveiled a new social gaming app for its 2010-2011 ski and snowboard season that allows visitors to track their activities and share them with their friends and family — all via radio frequency (RF)-enabled chips embedded in their season passes and lift tickets.
The app, called EpicMix, is a cross between Nike+ and miCoach, which allow you to track your physical activities, and Gowalla, which rewards users for exploring new areas via its Trips feature. Like Gowalla, EpicMix rewards users with special pins for various accomplishments, such as being on the first chairlift of the day, or skiing a certain number of vertical feet over a designated period of time. How It Works To access their stats and the pins they've earned, participants will need to log in to the app via their desktops or a free mobile app for iPhone and Android devices.
Why We Like It. North Korea Appears Capable of Jamming GPS Receivers | News. Defense officials in South Korea and military analysts elsewhere are expressing concern about what they call a new type of threat from Pyongyang. The North Koreans, according to South Korea's government, are now capable of disrupting GPS receivers, which are a critical component of modern military and civilian navigation. This week, the South Korea Communications Commission informed lawmakers that between August 23 and 25, signals emanating from near the North Korean city of Kaesong interfered with South Korean GPS military and civilian receivers on land and at sea.
Officials say the jammers were repeatedly switched on for 10-minute periods over a number of hours during the three days. Sources in South Korea, Japan and the United States say defense officials in all three countries are concerned about Pyongyang's apparent ability to disrupt GPS navigation, and are discussing its ramifications. Military use of GPS receivers GPS uses up to 32 satellites operated by the U.S. Air Force. U.S. The Web 2.0 Summit Points of Control Map. Sex Offender Tracker App - For Android and iPhone. Augmented Reality or Futuristic Invasion of Privacy?: Tech News « Emergency EU Galileo sat-nav service plans develop | Security Management. Secure satellite navigation for emergency and security services moved closer to reality under proposals published by the European Commission on Friday. The proposals cover access rules for the Public Regulated Service (PRS), which will be set up on the back of Europe's Galileo satellite system and will use highly encrypted signals to protect against threats to infrastructure in the case of disasters or terrorist threats.
PRS will only be accessible to authorised governmental bodies and, according to the Commission, "third [party] countries and international organisations who conclude the appropriate agreements with the European Union". "The safety and security of each and every European citizen lies at the heart of this proposal," industry and entrepreneurship commissioner Antonio Tajani said in a statement. "Furthermore, the market for PRS applications offers an important opportunity for Europe's entrepreneurs," he added.