So I’ve just been thinking about privacy, and how everyone’s location can be tracked. Then I realized: What about people who have no permission to enter the country?
Like do they just decide to not have a phone, or do they still have phones and just roll the dice and hope they don’t get caught?
They don’t use tracking capabilities to help people, they use it for law enforcement. And if you want to track someone illegally entering the country cellphone triangulation is the least effective method. The person could: - Not have a phone - turn the phone off - use a burner phone and number. And by the time you’ve found them they’re already across. If their traveling by boat they could drop the phone in the water aswell. And cell tower triangulation is inaccurate anyway, a 5G triangulation can pin someone down to the cm. (Half a hotdog for the Americans.) And you need to have towers close enough to the entry point aswell. If the tower is too far away it will be inaccurate.
You’re high, half a hotdog is 7.5 cm
I think they’re conceptualizing hot dog radius.
What’s are the most common radii of lukewarm dogs?
The big thing is whether people are behaving in a manner that brings them to the attention of the government.
It’s not like you have to give your SSN to a carrier to get a phone; the government needs a reason to be tracking you.
Now, they very much could put in a warrant for all phones crossing the border at unusual times/locations. But someone who snuck in with family and is working cash-only jobs to get by is unlikely to get tagged by the government unless they’re going somewhere or doing something the government is already watching.
It’s not like you have to give your SSN to a carrier to get a phone
Actually it is like that, if you are getting any kind of deal where you’re paying off the phone with your service plan and/or commit to a term contract. They use it to run a credit check on you. Most companies where you’re committing to a length of service do this. It happened to me when I was going to get some kind of cable or internet service one time, where you got x number of months free if you promised to keep the plan for two years. They asked for my SSN and I refused, so they wouldn’t complete the transaction. That’s how I found out about why they want your SSN.
I assume they roll the dice because it’s rather hard to get by without a phone.
Also, it’s not like the government is actively tracking everyone’s location. I’m sure if they wanted to track me they could, but it’s not like my position is being actively logged right now.
It’s definitely being logged by your Telco and phone manufacturer. Police can send them warrants to ask which phones were in X area around Y time frame and go from there.
Of course. But they need to ask. The FBI or local police doesn’t get a daily report of our whereabouts every day.
Ur telco is legaly required to install any tracking the government wants and they legaly cant tell u.
I’ve often thought of a method to evade tracking.
You create a group where you all share one group of phones with standard apps. You use one phone for a week, then place it into the group pool and select a different phone. You just keep reshuffling the phones over and over again. And even after a month or two, transport a batch of phones across the country to a different group for the same number of phones and just keep rotating phones everywhere all the time.
That’s a bad idea. First you need to understand that for the government to be able to track every citizen first they must be able to track every phone, and then be able to figure out whose phone is who. You’re trying to break their tracking by denying the second step but in doing so you’ve made yourself a priority target.
Imagine you’re a government trying to track all of your citizens, and you’ve got the GPS data for every phone, and now need to assign them to specific persons and/or decide who you track specifically. Random Joe who goes from home to work and work to home will be last on the list, but a person whose itinerary changes every week, and drastically changes after a couple of months is someone that sticks out. And the moment someone notices this, it won’t be difficult to track other users with the same behavior, and realize they’re switching phones by comparing one phone’s behavior during one week to another phone during another week. And now they have the same information they would before, except they have their eyes on you more closely.
Plus you would probably need to login to your email or some account on the phone, and that would be enough to track that you changed your phone.
The best idea to avoid this sort of surveillance is to only carry your phone from home to work and back. No one will bat an eye about someone going for a run or something without his phone, and from someone tracking you’re just a boring person who only works and goes home.
What the government is capable of doing, and what the government will actually do, are two vastly different things. Movies depict the government as this insanely competent, unstoppable machine, with endless resources and desire. The reality is that detectives won’t even interview eye witnesses, since they’d have to leave their desk to do so. So, if a detective won’t even interview people with critical information about a case, how determined do you think they are about tracking down someone who may or may not exist, who they have no knowledge of, who probably hasn’t committed any crimes except for being here?
They might know where a phone is, but not if it belongs to a ‘legal’ person or not.
That depends on the country we’re talking about. I wouldn’t do it in authoritarian countries. But in the USA or other western countries for example, they usually don’t use their total surveillance technology to pursue minor and ordinary crimes. That’s mainly reserved for terrorism. You could end up in trouble by chance. But I’m not aware of any routines that connect cell tower data to deport immigrants. I’m not saying they can’t do it, they certainly already have the data ready to analyze. It’s just that it doesn’t happen to date. So your chances of getting persecuted are low. And a phone is a very useful device to carry around. (And strictly speaking, all phones leak your position and lots of personal information. If that’s valuable to someone, they shouldn’t carry a connected phone with them. Regardless of the situation.)
It’s pretty naive to believe, after everything in Project 2025, and after everything that Trump has said, that they will not use these powers in their upcoming mass deportations program.
Well, if they do what’s in Project 2025, you have a lot of other things to worry about. That’s full on autocracy. Probably no as bad as like in Afghanistan where women are prohibited to go outside… But it’s going to oppress everyone. Minorities and women first, of course. But as far as I read it’s also going to make economy worse. Take away everyones freedom, healthcare etc and replace it with the medieval version of it.
Yeah. It’s terrifying. I think most people either don’t believe it’s going to happen, or don’t grasp just what it means.
You’re gonna love when you learn about Sentient.
Don’t google it probably.
Accessing that location data isn’t trivial. The data is typically held by various private companies who put up at least token legal resistance to cover themselves from lawsuits.
Intelligence agencies have their own avenue for getting the data, and on paper they’re not allowed to share it with police agencies.
Police agencies typically need to specify the individual in question, or the specific location and time to get a warrant. This is because they’re not supposed to be able to blanket surveil an otherwise private piece of information without having a good reason.
The classic example is not being able to listen to every call on a payphone they know drug dealers use because they’ll listen to people who have not done anything illegal.
Intelligence agencies are an entirely different thing with weird special rules and minimal and strange oversight.This is all relevant because the government doesn’t actually know who’s allowed to be here or not.
Most people in the country without proper documentation entered legally and then just stayed outside the terms of their entry. The terms can be difficult to verify remotely, which is why you’re not actually here illegally until you go in front of a judge, they deport you, and then you return again.Finally, there are significant chunks of the country where location tracking via cell tower is imprecise enough to get the country wrong, and a lot of people live there. So any dragnet surveillance setup is going to have to exclude some pretty large population centers to avoid constantly investigating people in Windsor sometimes quickly teleporting into Detroit.
I disagree. Location data is trivial to obtain. I worked for a data broker and the company just buys location data from telecom companies. They werent allowed to disclose location and times, but they could use the data to verify a person’s work address and home address easily.
But you probably received the data anonymized, i.e. you had a code that meant a person, and you could track information on that person, but you couldn’t immediately know who that person was.
Otherwise that company, and whoever sold it its data, are in for a BIG lawsuit from any EU citizen you track. And you might say “who cares, my company didn’t act in the EU”, but whoever sold you the data certainly does, and they would get sued and fined very heavily, so it’s unlikely they would not anonymize the data before selling it.
The word “theoretically” is doing a LOT of work here.
Idk, I wouldn’t carry one across the border any more than I’d take one with me to a drug deal
I mean like after they manage to get in. A random phone being detected near the boarders is probably much more easily tracked down, but after they get in its a needle in a haystack, I think.
Idk, if you are at the point where law enforcement is going to a cell provider with a location request warrant you are pretty much already fucked. They know who you are, they know your phone number, they probably know where you live and work
Spending the resources and time to location track and arrest then deport people in such a way would be way too expensive and a waste of time probably
This depends on your (privacy) laws. The phone operators (and in all fairness, a lot of app developers) have access to the phone’s location.
If the government doesn’t need a warrant, and they can just ask for the location information at Apple or Google (or, for example Meta or X if those apps have location tracking permissions turned on), they could in theory find anyone they like at any time.
There’s a few things here.
The government doesn’t actually know who’s illegal or legal unless they specifically check a physical person. It’s not like they maintain a list of “illegal” people. Your name gets recorded when you enter the country legally, but it’s not recorded when you leave. If you fail to leave, they don’t really know until they find you and match you to the entry. If you entered illegally, there’s no record at all.
Second, You could easily use a fake ID or fake identity to get a cellphone and the carriers wouldn’t give a shit as long as the bill gets paid. It doesn’t even have to be under your name, maybe it’s under your friend’s account.
Third, I’m not sure how prevalent this is, but you don’t need a “cell” phone to have a phone. A lot of poor people just have a device that can connect to WIFI, and make calls through an app or just message.
Some carriers specifically cater to unbanked people.
When I worked at Radio Shack back in the day, Sprint had a card you could just hand to the cashier with cash. Didn’t even need to speak any English. The card had all your details on it.
Of course they charged a $5 fee per transaction because fuck poor people.
but it’s not recorded when you leave
Uhhh what gives you this idea?
You don’t talk to US customs on your way out via land borders.
If you fly out, there would be a flight record, but most of the other methods don’t get recorded. If you go to Canada, the canadian immigration shares that data with the US, assuming you use the same passport (some people have more than one)
If you go to Mexico though, there’s no record and the Mexican government doesn’t share that info with the US. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47541 Page 14
It depends. Physical borders may only photograph traffic for security purposes, no dedicated exit gate. Usually its the entry country that records your crossing, which they may or may not share with the other country.
I’m pretty sure TSA does record people exiting internationally though because people have been caught leaving after an arrest warrant has been issued, even if they made it past TSA onto the flight and into the air. TSA will know immediately if you checked in or boarded your flight.
Second, You could easily use a fake ID or fake identity to get a cellphone
You don’t actually need any ID in the US to set up a phone account. You could be anyone.
Prepaid phones don’t need an ID.
You can buy a prepay phone at Walmart or similar, then just buy cards to add airtime. You don’t have to register your name anywhere. I had one like that for years.
Ah yes, the Saul Goodman phones. What are yo sellin’? 🙃
When I was young that was how I had cell phone service. It was simply the cheapest option for a kid with no friends to have a cell phone to call their parents on at the time. $20 every 2-3 months or so plus a $40 flip phone and you’re golden
