UK advice - can ANY FONE be tracked?

a reply to: Bellor

The phone number is to prove you're not a 'bot,they send you a text which you have to reply to which at the moment 'bots can't do.
I don't get a penny of that money,worrying about it or not giving them my phone number won't change anything in the world,I just go with the flow and enjoy what freedom I do have.

a reply to: Imagewerx

Yeah im pretty much 100% positive it is nothing to do with filtering bots.

But anyways if you are happy to give them all your information, thats cool. But you must understand that many people have reservations about handing over personal information to faceless corporations and it has nothing to do with them being criminals as you suggested earlier.

Just look what happened to Ebay, what was it, 100 million peoples personal details stolen?, lol.

a reply to: Bellor

Any supposedly secure computer system that holds any sort of information about anything can be hacked.If one man can design it,another man can always find a way around it.If you don't want your personal details to fall into the wrong hands,don't give them to ANYONE.No bank account (pay for everything with cash),no mobile or home phone,no credit cards,not on the voters list.Quite how you'd get away without the inland revenue knowing about you is another matter though.The problem is that if you want to live in society and not be thought of as an outcast,these details have to be recorded somewhere,no one in the "civilised" world has the option of not having their personal details stored on electronic memory.Because every single computer in the world has the opportunity to be connected to every single other computer in the world,there really is nowhere to hide anymore.

a reply to: Imagewerx

I dont give my personal details to anyone, thats my point and it is not because I am a criminal. My employers do not know my real address and the inland revenue have little to no idea of where my real address is, I am not not lockd into a debt with the bank and they have no idea where I live, they have an address for sure, not mine though.

I have multiple phones all topd up in cash, both for work and for personal use, never had a credit card but I use plenty of pre-paid debit cards that can be toppd up in cash and used anywhere. And I know for a fact the voter register is using an address 15 years old. I do not feel much like an "outcast" in society, I get by just like everyone else. What does infuriate me though is this idiotic reliance on paper debt, once people wake up to the fact digital currencies are the future more the better, also make paying for coffee a lot easier instead of having to proxy through top up debit cards.

no one in the "civilised" world has the option of not having their personal details stored on electronic memory

Well that isnt quite true, everyone has the option, its just up to them to opt out, if they want to of course. I personally choose to opt out of mass government backd corporate surveillance, its just not my thing.

Like someone said, phones can be tracked via triangulation, but the GPS system can be used also. I know in the US the government is supposed to get a court order to track a phone, but it has been shown that their "probable cause" does not need to exist. These "courts" approve all requests. They can completely bypass the need to include the cell provider themselves these days, which is even more worrisome.

The truth is that if you're actually using your phone, it can be tracked in one way or another. Many phones can be tracked when they are turned off as well. I am not sure of the methods of tracking a phone that is turned off, but I do know that even older phones would either not power down fully, or would turn on after so many minutes to retrieve SMS messages, even though the phone appears to be off. You can also be tracked via wifi use, there are bluetooth tracking methods now, and who knows what else.

Sometimes there are GPS tracking apps installed and running in the background that you may not even know about. I think sometimes providers require this, but I'm not sure. Technically taking the battery out should make it untrackable, but your last known position could still be determined. But even more importantly, that means you couldn't use your phone. And to make matters even worse, skilled groups like the US NSA could remotely hack your phone to install a bug if they wanted. The FBI hacked phones to act like a bug.

It wouldn't surprise me if they started creating phones with a small, long-lasting battery that powered a small portion of circuitry to allow for tracking even when the phone doesn't have a battery in it. If it is possible, I don't see why it wouldn't be done, considering the phone manufacturers are not all unwilling to cooperate with the government when it comes to privacy and tracking. Although sometimes features are developed for good reasons, they are often misused.

a reply to: Bellor
Even pay-as-you-go phones can be tracked,they only need to get close enough to you once to grab your IMEI as it talks to the cell site and they've got you.

a reply to: JiggyPotamus

Only when the phone is switched on.The GPS receiver draws more power than any other service apart from the screen or display.Even with the screen totally blank,a small backup battery would last minutes rather than hours having to power the various parts of the GPS functions.
The ability to track them when switched off is a myth,the closest I can find to actual factual evidence is "most likley".If anyone has actual proof I'd like to see it please.

a reply to: Imagewerx

The point about a pay as you go phone is although it can be trackd like any other phone, they cannot identify you as the operator so they do not know who they are tracking. That anonymity acts as an extra layer of protection between you and state surveillance. IMEI can like wise be cloned and sims emulated in a virtual space. That however can be illegal depending on your jurisdiction. It is a fairly prudent security measure.

My family think I'm a bit weird, no cell phone, no bookface account, no twatter account, no blueberry, caller ID on my landline, don't use ebay much, will not give out my email address willy-nilly, only know three neighbours, (why has the correct English spelling got a red line under it?) anyway, if the damn government wants to find me, they can look.

I thought I'd try and give a bit more of a technical answer seeming people are assuming triangulation is based on 'masts'. I don't mean this in a bad way, but it sounds very movie-ish, along with questioning if your SIM can be tracked when not in a phone.

The SIM one is easy, no it can't. The current versions of SIMs being used don't have a power source, could that change? Possibly but how many people are really carrying a SIM just to insert in a phone for a short period of time?
It's also worth nothing what a SIM's purpose is - Subscriber Identity Module - that's its name if you want to read up on Wikipedia... Knowing its name probably makes more sense, it provides access to the network and its services. For those in the UK that have a BSkyB subscription, your viewing card is an old version of a SIM card.

Triangulation - this is technically possible but you're not connecting to masts. A mast is just a structure that may have a Base Transceiver Station (BTS) on it, the reason I pick up on this is just so you know a a BTS can be anywhere, a building for an example.

So a very brief explanation, when you power your phone on, its job is to connect to a BTS, register on the network and provide the services you're entitled to. One of these is finding you the best phone signal. As Americans are probably more likely to know, these are part of a cellular network (they call them cell phones). A BTS runs on a specific frequency which they have purchased. (in the UK back when Gordon Brown was chancellor of the exchequer, he decided on 5 companies could operate 3G networks - other mobile offerings would use these networks).
However, a BTS can only accept a finite amount of connections, so you need another cell on a different frequency, which means cells are shrinking to increase their capacity.

Why is this important? Well, modern technologies allow you to utilise more than one cell (Dual Cell - HSDPA). So you are establishing connections with multiple cells. Each cell or, BTS has a BSC - Base Station Computer. This isn't always at the BTS and BTS's can share BSCs. The important, or interesting part is, there is a VLR - Visitor Location Register, this basically holds the information about what BST you're connected to.

It can also hold dBi information from your phone, this is essentially how your phone decides where the best signal is coming from. From this you could calculate an estimated distance, use enough rating for enough BTS and you could get a decent set of coordinates.


The above was geared towards the original question of a more simple phone, granted it's not going to be using DC-HSDPA, however that was more to demonstrate multiple cells.

More modern phones, your iPhones etc start to pull in a lot more. Google came under fire when it was discovered their street view vans were also capturing data for wireless networks. So if your house has a WAP - Wireless Access Point, the data you're sending to and from that with your various devices can be captured.
Now this isn't particularly difficult, most wireless chip-sets have the ability to go into 'monitor mode' which allows you to just sit and watch traffic.

This is what they were doing, exactly why they were doing that and saving the data, who knows we can only speculate. Though the reason they were wanting WiFi information is to provide a poor-man's GPS. So when you're on the street it can calculate your position by local access points.
You also have GPS as mentioned and various other sensors which can simply transfer this information.

To give you an idea of how trivial this is, years ago when I was a student I used an Android phone and tablet to create a tracking device. It was course work and I designed it around a monitor for the elderly. Anyone with some fairly basic programming abilities could do this, I was able to take accelerometer information and decide if that person was moving, I could tell if they had their phone on charge etc etc, this was also syncing with a database whenever it could connect and all actions were timestamped.
The user would have no idea this was happening.


Oh and unregistered phones are almost certainly flagged, and it's not too difficult to create a pattern of locations. So if you are planning on doing something illegal and relying on your phone, never turn it on in your house or even home town, never buy a top up card within your town etc etc. These are all things that can be tracked and again, trivial for a computer to spot a pattern and work out what area you live in.

originally posted by: linusalebeertux
I thought I'd try and give a bit more of a technical answer seeming people are assuming triangulation is based on 'masts'. I don't mean this in a bad way, but it sounds very movie-ish, along with questioning if your SIM can be tracked when not in a phone.

If a phones number is known and active they absolutely can track you, but yes you have to be in range of more than one mast for 'them' to be able to find you. They use the signal strength your phone receives to guesstimate where you are, but of course if you have GPS on your phone and they know your info, they dont even have to use the masts.

I did work experience for 2 weeks with a telecoms company who install and upgrade phone masts, part of that work involved driving around with a phone with engineering mode on to make sure the coverage was good/working - so i know for an absolute fact its very real and the cops, while not common practice, can use it to locate an active phone.

a reply to: Biigs
They can still only work out which cell site(s) you're in range of,and can probably get your location to within a couple of hundred meters at best,this would be nothing more than an educated guesstimate based on the relative signal strengths from the closest cell sites.As the post a couple above says,they still need DF (Direction Finding) equipment to localise you more accurately than just knowing which cell site your phone's connected to.Cell sites have to be omni-directional because they wouldn't be any use otherwise,so can't possibly know which direction a signal is coming from.
DF equipment is VERY directional and can tell which direction the signal is coming from to within a few degrees,but will still only place the source somewhere along that straight line.You then have to move to a different location some miles away and take another DF reading,where these two lines cross is where the transmitter is located.In some cases they'd move again to a third location just to confirm and make sure it crosses at the same place as the first two.

UK, Italy, France, NATO, track every phone call since the beginning of the 80s. Not only "metadata", but every integral conversation, and stores them into EU unified criminal intelligence apparatus in Brussels.

More cameras and more snooping laws in the UK don't mean anything, they are just a waste of time repeating in law, something that has already been into practice since 1980.
The only really interesting question is: Is the law retroactive? Or is the parliament thinking to put retroactivity to the law. That would cover the ass of every politician and intelligence operative who abused the surveillance state for more than 30 years.

if your really paranoid about being tracked you could use a faraday bag to block the signal, it would only show your location when you use the phone but you can be in a place of your choosing when you do that

www.teeltech.com...

originally posted by: angelchemuel
a reply to: grainofsand

My son informed me the other day that if you have one of these new fandangled phones, the tracking is in the chip/sim, so even if you take out the battery it can still be tracked.....

Rainbows
Jane

Ask him how much power it would take to transmit a signal back to the nearest mast, and where does the SIM get that power from without a battery.

You can certainly have passive tracking - RFID is all the rage, after all - but it requires some level of proximity to a powered device that is designed to trigger it and listen.

Now, if someone where to say "shopping centres have devices fitting all around that can track RFID (or similar) passive tags fitted to SIM cards/phones/etc even without a battery" then I would be less dubious. Any tool which helps them analyse shopping habits and the flow of people around the centre is going to be attractive to the owners for commercial reasons.