For the First Time in Cell Phone History, You Can Opt Out

On April 3, 1973, a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper stood on a sidewalk in Manhattan, raised a two-and-a-half-pound prototype to his ear, and placed the world’s first handheld cellular phone call.

The man he dialed was his chief rival at Bell Labs. Cooper wanted him to hear the news firsthand: that Motorola had beaten him to it, from the middle of a New York City sidewalk, on a telephone connected to nothing at all.

It took another decade before ordinary people could join in. In October 1983, the first commercial cellular network in America switched on in Chicago, and the “car phone” arrived— a handset on a coiled cord, wired into the console of a sedan.

I doubt a single one of the engineers who built these systems imagined that the descendants of the car phone would one day know where you sleep, whom you talk to, what you read at 2 a.m., and every place you’ve ever been.

Most privacy-conscious people believe they’ve handled this. They install a VPN to hide their internet traffic, use Brave for more private browsing, message friends through an encrypted app like Signal, and they feel covered.

And those tools are genuinely beneficial for privacy.

But beneath the apps sits the cellular network itself, the layer that connects your phone to the world, and at that layer you are wide open.

While your phone sits in your pocket apparently doing nothing, it is actually announcing itself to the towers around it, because that is the only way the network can find your phone when a call comes in.

Those introductions rely on two ID numbers. The first lives on your SIM card and identifies your account; the industry calls it the IMSI, and it exists so the network knows whom to bill.

The second, the IMEI, is a serial number burned permanently into the hardware, which is how a carrier can block a stolen handset even after the thief swaps in a fresh SIM. You will never see either number, but the network sees both, every day.

And anyone with the right equipment can trick your phone into revealing them.

A device called an IMSI catcher does nothing more sophisticated than pretend to be a cell tower; your phone, trusting by design, walks up and introduces itself just as it would to the real thing.

Police departments own these devices, and so do people with worse intentions; whoever operates one learns precisely which phones are in a given crowd.

The location part surprises people most, because everyone assumes location means GPS, and GPS has an off switch. But the network never needed GPS.

Locating you is plain physics. To hand your call from one tower to the next as you move, the network has to know which tower you’re closest to, how strong your signal is, and how long that signal takes to arrive.

Put those three measurements together and you can place a phone within about a city block, even tighter where the towers are dense.

Wireless companies knowing your location is a side effect of the call connecting at all, not a feature somebody added.

All of that housekeeping — the introductions, the handoffs, the location math— travels on a hidden channel the industry calls the “control plane”, and it is where your metadata lives.

The networks that exchange it were built to trust one another completely: when your carrier needs something from a network overseas, it asks, and the foreign network complies without verification.

Surveillance firms figured out they could rent access to that trust, and they now use it to locate phones and reroute text messages anywhere on earth.

In 2016, security researchers went on 60 Minutes and proved the point by tracking a sitting US Congressman using nothing but his phone number.

Then comes the paperwork. Every call you make, every text you send, every data session you open gets written down— your IDs, the towers you touched, the time, the location— in a file called a Call Data Record.

The official purpose is billing, but the practical effect is a diary of your movements, which carriers keep, some retaining location records for years. A stranger with the right access could reconstruct where you stood on an afternoon you’ve long forgotten.

Here’s the bottom line: almost none of this is necessary.

Connecting your call requires a couple of identifiers and a rough location, held briefly. It does not require a multi-year archive of everywhere you have ever stood.

Carriers keep all of it because they can, and because the data is worth real money— to advertisers, to data brokers, to governments, to anyone willing to pay.

In that arrangement you are not the customer; you are the inventory.

And for the entire history of the cell phone, you had no vote in the matter. Every carrier ran the same plumbing, logged the same records, leaked the same identifiers, and the only way to opt out was to not carry a phone.

That is finally changing.

There is now a US carrier called Cape, built specifically to collect as little as possible: it deletes those call records after about a day instead of warehousing them for years, and it can rotate the ID number on your SIM so it becomes a moving target rather than a permanent name tag.

We have no connection to the company, and this isn’t a sales pitch. We just came across it and thought it was worth sharing, because it’s good to see someone finally working on these problems. The bigger the market for this kind of privacy grows, the more options you’ll have— and we’re all about options.

Source

Simon Black is an international investor, entrepreneur and permanent traveler. His daily letter is both educational and entertaining, and we suggest that those who want unbiased, actionable information about global opportunities sign up for Sovereign Man’s free, actionable newsletter at http://www.SovereignMan.com.

From Simon Black of SovereignMan.com

Source: https://www.schiffsovereign.com/trends/for-the-first-time-in-cell-phone-history-you-can-opt-out-155325/