Boy Was I Wrong

iphonetracker

I was looking back through some old tech stories last night when I came across one on cellphone tracking. Maybe you remember the story?

A few years ago, an iPhone user found his phone was compiling a list of cell towers he’d pinged and when. He even plotted his iPhone derived itinerary on a map (above).

It’s obvious, your cell carrier has to know where you are to deliver calls. What was surprising was the ‘dossier’ being kept. A lot of people were upset.

Here’s where I was wrong. I said cell companies could do that tracking, but not the government. After all, there’s the 4th Amendment.

Now we have Edward Snowden’s revelations. I feel like a sap. My script was very naive.

I’d rather not be enough of a cynic to see conspiracy everywhere. I’d rather not be so jaded I can’t believe denials from those in the know. I was played. We were all played.

It’s tough not to be jaded and cynical now.

5 thoughts on “Boy Was I Wrong”

  1. I was just on a news site that proclaimed that (HORRORS!) the government had kept track of Viet Nam protestors, and MLK and Muhammad Ali. I got on to the comments board and asked if this was really news since it had all come out in the ’70s.
    The government, for all its inefficiency and faults, is typically way ahead of the commercial world in technology. There’s very little I’d be surprised at their doing. But that doesn’t mean I’m particularly jaded or cynical either. Rather I tend to think of myself as a realist.

  2. I recall the story you told on the news about iPhones. It doesn’t surprise me in the least what the government is doing. In some respects I think it is a good idea, especially you could be living next door to a terrorist. After 9/11, things had to change or we could suffer from another 9/11 attack.

  3. Younger generations think they’re preserving, or even gaining, freedoms….but I see just the opposite. Privacy is now just a myth. The government knows who we communicate with, what we buy, what books we read, what we watch on TV and the computer, and precisely when we do it all. Our health records aren’t sacred, our GPS guides us with government-owned equipment, and they seem to have free reign to search whomever and wherever in the name of “homeland security”.
    I know our lives had to change after 9-11, and I know some extra precautions have to be taken, but I think we may be going too far.

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