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 might know where a phone is, but not if it belongs to a ‘legal’ person or not.
I get what you are saying, but there is a pretty big difference between “undocumented immigrant” and “the authorities are actively looking for you.” Also, it’s pretty easy to enter alias information into a phone so you can use it without announcing that it belongs to you.
There is a big difference as of now. Who knows what’s coming.
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
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.
We were in the u.s. and the data had no names but did have IMEI numbers which is easily matched to a person. So ya, kinda anonymous, but not really.
They werent allowed to disclose location and times
That makes it wholly unsuitable for a dragnet surveillance system.
Further, a business can aquire data that a police agency can’t gather without a warrant.
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.
Unless you’re a person of great interest that level of effort just isn’t happening at the scale needed.
They got better things to do than go after all the people just trying to vibe with the locals.
Law enforcement got their hands on the location records of the people who stormed the white house by… buying it from google.
Not every government has as much spying going on as some might think.
How would they know who’s phone to track if the individual is undocumented?
Account linking from ad ids, and social media profiles.
Unless they post on those social media that their visa is expiring, how are social media profiles to know that info?
Yes there is plenty of track-able info on this person’s phone.
Law enforcement still needs to know exactly who they’re looking for, in order to know exactly which phone to track.
If the individual in question is undocumented, by definition they can’t know exactly who they’re looking for. They can’t tie them to a specific individual phone.
In functional democracies, there is law protecting individual against the government. Meaning that you’ll require a court-order to request the localization of a phone (to the phone provider or applications collecting GPS data). This is (in democratic countries) allowed in criminal matters but not for administrative status matters like immigration.
Partly true, there are other ways to legally track a phone. For instance, when you call 911 and are unable to tell where you are, they can track your phone. There are other loopholes to track without a court order. Especially in the US the so called “citizen rights” are very limited compared to other democracies. Not that the US is a functioning democracy in the first place (slavery, gerrymandering, etc.). The US government also bends the rules a lot (like torturing people abroad instead), or straight out breaks them (remember Snowden?)
That doesn’t change the fact that it’s really hard to know which phone is from an undocumented immigrant, especially when there are millions of phones around. Even with AI it’s hard to mass spy on people to find out whether they are undocumented, as people rarely send an ondinary sms message saying “hey I’m an undocumented immigrant”. Most people use encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, making it even harder. And if someone uses their phone like anyone else does, they are invisible in the mass.
I work in 911 dispatch
The location we get from your phone isn’t exactly a magic “here’s exactly where this person is” button.
For the most part, we rely on triangulation from the cell towers, which means the quality of that location is highly dependent on how many towers are around, how close you are to them, signal strength, the surrounding geography, whether you’re inside a building, in a basement, outside, etc. and the location isn’t constantly updating.
I work in an area with pretty solid service, and at my cunter our policy is that if our ping is accurate to within about 300 meters we can use that if we can’t get any other location information from the caller, and most of the time we’re well within that, but not always. And a 300 meter radius is still a pretty big area, if that drops within a crowded downtown area, or if they’re in a high rise apartment or office building, that could be pretty much useless. And it takes us about 20 seconds to refresh the location and the new location may not be accurate when it does come in, so they’re in a moving vehicle they might well be a half mile away from where they were by the time the next ping comes in. And once you hang up we stop getting that location info and if we want to ping your phone again it’s a bit of a process that requires our officers or our dispatch supervisor calling the phone company, faxing or emailing them paperwork, etc. so not something we can just do totally on the fly, and for whatever reason the pings we get when we do that never seem to be very accurate, and it takes some time and we only get one ping at a time, and if we’re lucky we get one maybe every 10 minutes. We can also only request those pings when we have reason to believe that someone is in danger.
I suspect that there’s a whole mess of local/state/federal laws and regulations, and department/agency/corporate policies that come into play with all of this with a million different exceptions, but overall that’s going to be broadly true in most places around the IS at least.
We are starting to get more gps-based cellular location, this kind of depends on your phone’s capabilities and settings, what network you’re on, and your local 911 center’s capabilities. We’re generally a bit ahead of the curve on our technology and capabilities, so that’s not something everywhere can do yet. We’ve actually had it for a while but the implementation was pretty janky and not very useful, but we got some upgrades within the last year or so. It’s usually, but not always, more accurate than triangulation, the location updates faster, and we do continue to get location updates after you hang up but only for about a minute or so.
Generally speaking, we also have no quick way of knowing who’s calling from a cell phone. Your name won’t usually come up on our caller ID, just your carrier. If you have your emergency info filled out on your smartphone and made it available we can access that, but frankly most people haven’t. If you’ve called before and given your name, we can search for prior calls (in our jurisdiction) from your phone number. Otherwise we can try our luck with some free phone number lookup websites, or try to get the subscriber information from your provider, and if you’re on some kind of a family plan that may mean we’d get maybe your parents information from the phone company not yours, and some prepaid plans don’t really seem to have much if any information on their subscribers on file so it ends up being a dead end.
And that’s pretty much the extent of what we can do from 911. There may be other resources cops can use or other options for exceptional circumstances, but that’s outside the scope of 911 tracking your phone.
Also if you call a non-emergency line, even if it’s one that redirects into a 911 center (we answer a lot of the departments when they’re out of the office, some of them just always come into us, and even if you reach someone at the station there’s a good chance they’ll transfer you to our central dispatch) we won’t get any location info and we need to go through the phone company to get a ping.
And calls from TextNow numbers and other similar apps can be really hard to track down.
Thank you for the explanation. Really interesting to know more about it.
Although I live in a different country so over here it might be different.
It’s interesting to know the capabilities of the 911 dispatch, however I believe this is different with intelligence agencies. When I see what Snowden leaked, the location data isn’t just from cell towers but also from the phone GPS itself, as well as wifi data. Those agencies often operate in a large grey area, or just outside the law. Loads of reasons to track someone without a court order. Look at the terrorist act which came after 9/11. Loads of bypasses when it comes to “terrorists”. Holding indefinitely without charge, denying legal advice or a phone call for example. Claim someone is a terrorist and you don’t need a judge anymore.
When Trump wants agencies (like ICE for example) to have an easier job to track undocumented immigrants, he can change the law (especially with a majority in the supreme court and government). Look at Hitler. When he came to power he managed to change the law for so many things to do the most horrific acts. A law is only a law until it is changed.
You can scream “you can’t do this, we have rights!” but those rights can be taken away in an instant (look at abortion for example, or slavery when incarcerated in certain states). You have rights until you don’t.
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.
The word “theoretically” is doing a LOT of work here.
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.
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
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.
As soon as manufacturing (of which a significant portion is food processing!) starts losing shifts and closing due to not having enough employees they’ll see the shortages and flip pretty fast. Manufacturing jobs rely heavily on immigrant labor because nobody wants to work in factories despite the pretty good pay and benefits, so the only people who do work in factories are the people who simply can’t get better jobs.
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.
I think people talk a lot. Especially politicians and populists. It’d certainly be sad if the USA forgot altogether that the country was supposed to be about freedom and democracy. And not a monarchy/autocracy or some religious Caliphate. I think there’s still quite some sane people around. So my hopes are up. But it’s a big problem, for sure.
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.
