Apple refuses to enable
iPhone emergency settings that could save countless
lives
https://thenextweb.com/apple/2017/08/10/apple-refuses-enable-iphone-settings-save-countless-lives/#.tnw_O0GihW8u
OK why Apple are you
refusing? Dfarber
Because they've stopped beating their wives, of course.
[first, note that the above URL contains covert tracking
information,
that "#.tnw_O0GihW8u" on the end. Lauren, Dave, don't you
strip that
stuff off before sending it to hundreds or thousands of
friends? You
should!]
I'm not a big Apple defender, but Apple is probably making
the right
choice here. The extremely slanted article that Dave and
Lauren
forwarded neglects to mention giving users real choice
about their own
privacy. It also neglects the use of large-company
Internet-based
physical tracking services that are required and used for
this
supposedly "simple" AML (Advanced Mobile Location)
feature.
If users have location services turned off, they should
stay off, even
for emergency calls. I don't want Apple (or Google
especially)
overriding my choices about whether my phone is going to
track me.
Especially not with the explicit connivance of government
and
supranational eurocrats. These guys are famous for
forcing stupid
privacy choices on the public (like the RFID chips in
passports,
chosen because the immigration bureaucrats didn't consider
merely
moving their OCR passport readers 20 feet back along the
queue of
incoming people).
On my own free software Android phone I enable the phone
to find its
location via receive-only radio transmissions from GNSS
satellites
(US's GPS, Europe's GLONASS, and China's Beidou
satellites). This
enables my free software mapping application (OsmAnd,
which uses the
free culture OpenStreetMap database, which is stored
directly in my
phone) to help me navigate. Neither Android nor OsmAnd is
reporting
either my general position or my specific location to ANY
satellites
nor ANY servers anywhere. (Yes, Virginia, it is possible
and easy to
use mapping applications that DO NOT report your location
to Apple,
Google, Bing, NSA, or anybody else. Of course, Apple,
Google, Bing,
and NSA don't tell you that.)
I explicitly do not turn on "WiFi" or "GSM base station"
location
services. That's because these services both require that
the phone
first listen to the local radio environment, and then
REPORT that
radio environment to servers run by large companies, via
the Internet.
These servers, run by Apple or Google or their
subcontractors, store
that information, and then reply to my phone with location
information
about those specific WiFi access points and those specific
GSM cell
towers. In both cases, some big company has silently
collected a data
point about where my phone is, and thus where I am. And
they are
under no obligation to me to use that information solely
for my own
benefit; quite the opposite. They use it for their OWN
benefit, and
even use it to build up their databases about WiFi access
points they
haven't yet discovered. They use it to sell things to me.
They use
it to report me to government agencies and civil suit
opponents under
subpoenas, wiretap orders, or National Security Letters.
Etc.
The article about AML was closely cribbed from press
releases and
other info published by EENA, the European Emergency
Number
Association, a nonprofit funded by EU project funding and
by commercial
vendors who sell to police agencies.(*) The article and
the EENA press
release carefully neglect to point out how the
government-requested
AML feature would both override the user's location
privacy settings,
and would report the user's location to some large
faceless
corporation:
"The process is completely automated. ... turn[s] on
GNSS (global
navigation satellite system) and Wi-Fi. The phone then
automatically
sends an SMS to emergency services, detailing the
location of the
caller."
The "report my location to large corporation" step between
"turn on
Wi-Fi" and "send an SMS to emergency services" has
conveniently been
ignored by this slanted article. It's all about Saving
the Children,
not about Government Mandated Citizen Tracking Via
Megacorps. The
"ignore my privacy settings" step isn't mentioned either;
instead,
EENA is quoted as saying "accurate location information
should be sent
during ALL emergency calls (emphasis theirs)" --
regardless of the
user's privacy choices. After all, who's in charge here?
The
police agencies, or the citizen?
The article also doesn't report that a significant
fraction of calls
to government emergency services (911 in the US; 112 in
Europe) are
spurious, typically "pocket dials". AML would report your
location to
a company and to the emergency bureau, not just for real
911 calls
that you make in an emergency, but for every 911 pocket
dial as well.
Try a web search for "911 pocket dial" for tons of links
like these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_dialing#Accidental_calling_of_emergency_services
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/remember-to-lock-your-phone-911-operators-forced-to-field-thousands-of-pocket-dials/article22990236/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/man-dies-911-dispatchers-mistake-call-for-pocket-dial-1.3677006
http://abcnews.go.com/US/911-pocket-dial-leads-arrest-burglary-charges/story?id=26473210
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/blogs/abc-news/apparent-butt-dial-oregon-police-leads-drug-bust-113206871--abc-news-topstories.html
http://www.pennlive.com/nation-world/2014/12/woman_25_arrested_after_pocket.html
This vague ETSI tech report for AML is the best technical
description
available of the service:
http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_tr/103300_103399/103393/01.01.01_60/tr_103393v010101p.pdf
It notes that if you're roaming in another country, either
the SMS
containing your location will go to your home country (not
to the
local emergency dispatcher -- another location information
leak), or
the phone will need to contain a database of countries and
their
dispatcher SMS numbers, plus a mechanism for regularly
updating this
database. The report ignores the idea that the emergency
dispatchers
in each country should be able to forward such information
to the
right country's dispatchers; the standard tries to push
all the
complication into the phone firmware.
It also states that:
"The use of AML software should be invisible to the user
so
as not to confuse them when they are trying to get help.
No record of the SMS message should be available to
the user either during or after the emergency call."
In other words, don't tell the user that you spied on
them, and don't
let them see any record of your spying.
It also notes that turning on location services can drain
the battery,
thus terminating the voice 911 call earlier.
It also says that a Time of Positioning should be sent in
the SMS
message; "the handset should attempt to use the time
established by an
NTP server, this should be possible if a network
connection is
available." So now there's a second access to an NTP
server somewhere
on the Internet, that AML is requiring the handset to do,
invisibly.
It's getting less and less simple, the more we look into
the details...
Meanwhile, the proponents(*) have this to say:
http://www.eena.org/download.asp?item_id=209
"Are there any privacy risks?
No. ..."
John
(*) EENA says it's a nonprofit, not a regulator. But it
lobbies for
and coordinates 1300 police agency bureaucrats from all
over Europe
and the world. It's funded by ~400K euros of project
funding from the
EU government, plus 90 corporate members each paying
10,000 euros a
year for the privilege of marketing their products to the
1300 "no
membership fee" bureaucrat members; total about 1.1M euros
a year. We
are seeing more orgs like this, full of officials but
exempt from FOIA
and sunshine laws, pushing totalitarian "solutions" that
then their
members go back and mandate in their own jurisdictions.
AAMVA is a
big one in the US, pushing the idea that to solve
"terrorism",
everyone needs a government issued ID, tied to a national
ID database,
just to exist or travel. Its membership: Heads of
Departments of
Motor Vehicles in each state -- the ones who issue those
ID cards.
They decline to allow privacy activists to join their
membership,
conferences, or discussions; we tried.