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10-30-2018

Mobile phones have become ubiquitous and basic communications tools—now used not only for phone calls, but also for accessing the Internet, sending text messages, and documenting the world.

Unfortunately, mobile phones were not designed for privacy and security. Not only do they do a poor job of protecting your communications, they also expose you to new kinds of surveillance risks—especially location tracking. Most mobile phones give the user much less control than a personal desktop or laptop computer would; it's harder to replace the operating system, harder to investigate malware attacks, harder to remove or replace undesirable bundled software, and harder to prevent parties like the mobile operator from monitoring how you use the device. What's more, the device maker may declare your device obsolete and stop providing you with software updates, including security fixes; if this happens, you may not have anywhere else to turn for these fixes.

Some of these problems can be addressed by using third-party privacy software—but some of them can't. Here, we'll describe some of the ways that phones can aid surveillance and undermine their users' privacy.

SAMSUNGUSBDriverforMobilePhones.exe The USB Driver for Windows is available for download on this page. You need the driver only if you are developing on Windows and want to connect a Samsung Android device to your development environment over USB. The Social and Environmental Impact of Mobile Phones Since their 2007 release, over 7 billion smartphones have been manufactured. Take a bus only a few stops in any city in Europe and you'll witness the profound impact of mobile phones on society. Mobile phones have become ubiquitous and basic communications tools—now used not only for phone calls, but also for accessing the Internet, sending text messages, and documenting the world. Unfortunately, mobile phones were not designed for privacy and security. Not only do they do a poor job of protecting your communications, they also expose you to new kinds of surveillance risks.

Location Tracking Anchor link

The deepest privacy threat from mobile phones—yet one that is often completely invisible—is the way that they announce your whereabouts all day (and all night) long through the signals they broadcast. There are at least four ways that an individual phone's location can be tracked by others.

1. Mobile Signal Tracking — Towers

In all modern mobile networks, the operator can calculate where a particular subscriber's phone is located whenever the phone is powered on and registered with the network. The ability to do this results from the way the mobile network is built, and is commonly called triangulation.

One way the operator can do this is to observe the signal strength that different towers observe from a particular subscriber's mobile phone, and then calculate where that phone must be located in order to account for these observations. The accuracy with which the operator can figure out a subscriber's location varies depending on many factors, including the technology the operator uses and how many cell towers they have in an area. Very often, it is accurate to about the level of a city block, but in some systems it can be more accurate.

There is no way to hide from this kind of tracking as long as your mobile phone is powered on and transmitting signals to an operator's network. Although normally only the mobile operator itself can perform this kind of tracking, a government could force the operator to turn over location data about a user (in real-time or as a matter of historical record). In 2010, a German privacy advocate named Malte Spitz used privacy laws to get his mobile operator to turn over the records that it had about his records; he chose to publish them as an educational resource so that other people could understand how mobile operators can monitor users this way. (You can visit here to see what the operator knew about him.) The possibility of government access to this sort of data is not theoretical: it is already being widely used by law enforcement agencies in countries like the United States.

Another related kind of government request is called a tower dump; in this case, a government asks a mobile operator for a list of all of the mobile devices that were present in a certain area at a certain time. This could be used to investigate a crime, or to find out who was present at a particular protest. (Reportedly, the Ukrainian government used a tower dump for this purpose in 2014, to make a list of all of the people whose mobile phones were present at an anti-government protest.)

Carriers also exchange data with one another about the location from which a device is currently connecting. This data is frequently somewhat less precise than tracking data that aggregates multiple towers' observations, but it can still be used as the basis for services that track an individual device—including commercial services that query these records to find where an individual phone is currently connecting to the mobile network, and make the results available to governmental or private customers. (The Washington Postreported on how readily available this tracking information has become.) Unlike the previous tracking methods, this tracking does not involve forcing carriers to turn over user data; instead, this technique uses location data that has been made available on a commercial basis.

2. Mobile Signal Tracking — Cell Site Simulator

A government or another technically sophisticated organization can also collect location data directly, such as with a cell site simulator (a portable fake cell phone tower that pretends to be a real one, in order to “catch” particular users' mobile phones and detect their physical presence and/or spy on their communications, also sometimes called an IMSI Catcher or Stingray). IMSI refers to the International Mobile Subscriber Identity number that identifies a particular subscriber's SIM card, though an IMSI catcher may target a device using other properties of the device as well.

The IMSI catcher needs to be taken to a particular location in order to find or monitor devices at that location. Currently there is no reliable defense against all IMSI catchers. (Some apps claim to detect their presence, but this detection is imperfect.) On devices that permit it, it could be helpful to disable 2G support (so that the device can connect only to 3G and 4G networks) and to disable roaming if you don't expect to be traveling outside of your home carrier's service area. These measures can protect against certain kinds of IMSI catchers.

3. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Tracking

Modern smartphones have other radio transmitters in addition to the mobile network interface. They usually also have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support. These signals are transmitted with less power than a mobile signal and can normally be received only within a short range (such as within the same room or the same building), although sometimes using a sophisticated antenna allows these signals to be detected from unexpectedly long distances; in a 2007 demonstration, an expert in Venezuela received a Wi-Fi signal at a distance of 382 km or 237 mi, under rural conditions with little radio interference. Both of these kinds of wireless signals include a unique serial number for the device, called a MAC address, which can be seen by anybody who can receive the signal. The device manufacturer chooses this address at the time the device is created and it cannot be changed using the software that comes with current smartphones.

Unfortunately, the MAC address can be observed in wireless signals even if a device is not actively connected to a particular wireless network, or even if it is not actively transmitting data. Whenever Wi-Fi is turned on on a typical smartphone, the smartphone will transmit occasional signals that include the MAC address and thus let others nearby recognize that that particular device is present. This has been used for commercial tracking applications, for example to let shopkeepers deter

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