I've been not carrying a phone with me lately, not because of tracking fears, but out of a sort of experiment to see if I really need to be connected in the relatively short distances between my laptop having a wifi connection (which it has at home, at the office, in coffee shops, on trains, etc.). I suppose avoiding this dragnet is a nice bonus, but I wonder how long it'll be until not carrying a phone gets registered as somehow suspicious in itself.
What kinds of emergencies? I live in a pretty densely populated city, so there are basically always people around. I guess I'd just yell for help in the worst case? But if I'm not literally incapacitated in a gutter, I'd walk to the nearest police station, hospital, metro station, or 24-hour 7/11. Or knock on an apartment door to request help.
What I find strange about this (common) question is that nobody seems to remember what they did before mobile phones. I got my first mobile phone in 2001, but it's not like I was chained to my house from birth until 2001.
I admit I might be more wary if I lived in a suburban or rural area where I could end up broken down in a car miles from civilization. Then a phone is a nice backup.
You can call 911 even if you don't pay for cell service. We gave my grandmother an old, deactivated cell phone just for that purpose.
"The FCC's basic 911 rules require wireless service providers to transmit all 911 calls to a PSAP, regardless of whether the caller subscribes to the provider’s service or not." http://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services/
Doesn't cover calling a tow truck, AAA, or a friend or relative to come pick you up. But if you only use the phone for real life-threatening emergencies, you don't have to pay.
While I'd appreciate being notified if a parent has a heart attack, there's a whole bunch of more important people that need to be called before me - get them an ambulance before you call me - and, truth is, there's very little I could do in terms of "emergency response" anyway.
I can't off-hand think of anything where contacting me personally would be required in an "emergency situation", if it's really an "emergency" there's probably better qualified people to call. This is colored by my situation, I'm not a parent, I'm not the sole decision maker for anything mission critical (either personally or professionally). I'd be sad (or sadder) if my Mum or Dad died and I missed out on saying goodbye because nobody could contact me immediately, but they live 5hrs away from me so that's a pretty unlikely scenario.
I'm kinda "at peace" with spending time "uncontactable" anyway, I spend at least an hour a day (and sometimes 8 or 10 hours) on a motorcycle - where I might feel my phone ringing in my pocket, but I don't answer it until I've got to where I'm going and stopped the bike. I also treat the phone the same way in movies/restaurants/gigs/meetings, and often while deep in something complicated at work.
Personally, I don't buy into the idea that my phone is so other people can reliably contact me immediately in case of emergency. When work wants that, it's called "on-call" and they pay me for it. In my personal life, I answer my phone if and when it suits me, and I'm not enslaved to anybody who happens to have my number.
This is only an issue because it is possible and as a result we are infantilising ourselves. If you cannot be contacted over something that you would find important, this is not a tragedy, even if the circumstances are tragic. Before telephones, people would still travel all over the world and would only find out things like this by letter, sometimes months after the event.
I've been out of my home country for > 6 years, have lived and worked in 3 countries in that time, and spent 2 years driving through 16 more. Does that qualify?
Right, and it's not like the people who somehow existed before cell phone technology magically perished because of these supposed emergencies. We are not helpless creatures here, sheesh.
FWIW my question wasn't meant to be a scare tactic. I genuinely wanted to know what the plan was in case of emergencies. I suppose I could have (and should have, since HN seems to value explicitness and literalism) elaborated to avoid assumption and/or presumption.
Don't buy in to the fear mentality that's strangling American discourse. People were dealing with emergencies just fine without cell phones... just 15 years ago.
This is how I get by without having a smartphone. My friends have given me a hard time since I tend to forget my phone at home more often than I forget my laptop at home.
You could also turn off 3G/4G and calls on your smartphone, but keep wifi. I just tried this on my Android ICS phone and it's pretty easy to accomplish. Enable airplane mode — which will disable calls, data and wifi — then re-enable wifi. The device can't text or call, but loading websites works.
By itself, at least for me, this would probably really limit my social life. I'd miss spontaneous texts and calls like "I'm in your neighborhood, want to grab tea?" But I wonder if this airplane mode trick, plus a VoIP app, plus some kind of internet-based text message replacement, might solve the problem. Has anyone tried this?
How would that work? Are you suggesting 3+ of the access points within range working together to triangulate me, and saving that information, along with the phone's MAC address or similar?
Hmmm. If I were a "cut-the-corners to the borders of being bent" cop (al la McNulty from Wired), I'd consider dropping cheap access points around places where I'd like to know if my "suspects" frequented, with SSIDs that matched local free wifi sources so that if a target had ever connected to the free wifi at the local McDonalds or Starbucks, their phone might automatically hook up to my "cloned" version of those hotspots. You'd be able to capture mac addresses from connection attempts, or being a little more evil - you could log any resulting traffic (and mitm ssl connections too, I wonder how many smartphone email/IM/socialnetwork apps do strong certificate checking?)
A single access point coupled with a typically lousy phone wifi antenna's range, narrows you down to well under a few hundred feet in my experience.
And Google's Streetview wifi data hoovering means thay've got a pretty good database of wifi access points to geographic co-ordinates. And I bet they're not the only ones building that database. I'd bet pretty good money that there was no ethical oversight or data retention/protection policy in place befre this started: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/security/police-t...
How is Google's wifi data relevant here? Unless Google themselves operate the hotspot, they won't know what devices polled it or connected to it.
Near as I can tell, the privacy threat here is very specific. You come within a few hundred feet of a hotspot, and for as long as you are in that location, the hotspot receives polling messages with your MAC address. The hotspot's operator can in theory log information like "device with MAC address 00:11:22:33:44:55 was within a few hundred feet of [hotspot location], Sat Jul 14 from 00:29:05 to 01:13:22".
How big of a threat this is depends on:
1. The difficulty of mapping a phone's MAC address to an individual. Do we know this is easy? Is there a big database with this information? A quick search suggests that it's possible to spoof the MAC address on a rooted phone, so it could be configured to change randomly every few hours. That would seem to defeat this attack on privacy, though doing so may be outside the technical know-how of most people.
2. How common is it for those who operate hotspots to log, aggregate and share this data? I'm confident the locally-owned cafe down the street doesn't log this data. What if it's something corporate-owned, like a Starbucks? Is this kind of logging, sharing and aggregating to track users just a theoretical possibility, or is it actually commonplace? I'd suspect the former.
I don't have answers to the questions I posed above. But barring evidence to the contrary, I strongly suspect that setting a smartphone to wifi only makes location tracking go from trivial to at least moderately difficult.
The hotspot also passes data back to the handset, which can identify it individually. If the hotspot location is previously known that gives you coordinates. In dense areas like New York, you're within range of multiple AP's on a fairly constant basis, allowing for real time triangulation. This is why google maps prompts you to turn on wifi to improve location, even though you are not connecting to the Internet through the AP's.
For almost all smartphones, almost all of the time, 3g data will be on. Your objection above was that location tracking would require MAC to person mapping and the cooperation of innumerable hotspot operators. This is not the case.
We've got a reading comprehension issue. You're responding to my post about how easily you can disable data on an Android smartphone, which I proposed as a way to avoid tracking.
I yes, I missed your GGP. But it still doesn't work. If you actively use a hotspot then IP GEO tracks you. If you use wireless data then you can be tracked by cell tower triangulation by the network operator, by GPS, and also by passive wifi tracking that we've been discussing.
I suppose that you might be able to try tunneling all of your outbound data through a VPN tunnel, but at that point you might as well go back to using internet cafes and phone booths.
I prefer misdirection. Set up a device that will appear to be 'you' in many places at once. For instance, google and facebook both routinely believe that I commute from New York to London at least 15 times a day.
There's also the problem that if your phone uses the hotspots internet connection, anything it connects to gets the ip address of the hotspot - and Google (and probably Apple, and quite likely several law enforcement agencies) can look up the geographic location of that ip address. I haven't looked to see how chatty my iPhone is when it gets a wifi internet connection, but I strongly suspect iMessage pings Apple with some unique identifier for my phone whenever it can. I'd be surprised if there wasn't some similar "phone home" process for an Android phone with an associated Google account as well. Google and Apple _probably_ won't roll over to a request from some curious local small-town cop, but I'd guess most three-letter-agencies can get pretty quick access to data about my phone if they ask the right way…
I haven't had a phone for something like 3 or 4 years. (I did briefly have a Nokia brick that I used maybe once or twice to make calls, but mostly as an alarm clock without a sim card.)
I spend a lot of time working at my laptop all day, and I don't want another full-blown computer in my pocket to suck my attention when I'm away from my laptop. Typically when I'm away from my laptop I'm busy with something--taking a walk in the park, drinking with frinds--that I don't want interrupted.
I also find that I can live perfectly fine without calls. I schedule things in advance with my girlfriend/friends, and email is enough for that. Maybe there's been one or two times in the past few years where I've really truly needed a phone (and I can't remember a specific case, but I assume there must have been such a time!).
Node is a really nice word for what the article describes.
The word "tracker" doesn't roll off the tongue very well and I think it suffers from the same flaw that the article criticizes about "phone", namely that it focuses on a specific aspect of a multi-purpose device.
Node seems a much better choice since it connotes all the important aspects of a smart phone:
- Connection to a network for the purpose of information sharing
- Being identifiable and addressable
- Processing capabilities
If we choose to find a more suitable name, I'd suggest maybe "Personal Node" or "Smart Node".
I think the problem is they're not a "personal node", they're nodes working for Apple or Google or your telco. The idea of "node-ness" carries connotations (at least to me) of being more useful as part of a network than as individual devices - and that's way more true for the people/organisations with access to data from the whole network of nodes, than the owner/operator of a singe node.
I wonder if Google are collecting geo-spacial data about your social graph? I suspect they could, if they wanted to, work out which section of your online social network are people you meet in real life, and which are people you only interact with on-line?
If I didn't misunderstand, you're suggesting that "node" carries the idea of being an autonomous entity that connects to a neutral network (i.e. no node is more privileged than any other). In that case a more accurate term might be "slave node" as opposed to the master nodes operated by carriers which control and monitor the communication flow. But I think that's a subjective view. The internet also has privileged nodes which could be used to monitor and control the network or individual nodes.
"Tracker" simply ignores all the service aspects of the device and focuses on a single use for one of the parties involved (costumer, carrier, manufacturer). In that respects it is just as misleading a term as "phone".
I'm surprised no one has mentioned putting the phone in a foil pouch. As 'antenna-gate' demonstrated it doesn't take a whole lot to make a phone unable to connect, with a conductive foil pouch you can put your phone in it and no matter what it is not sending out any info about you, but you can easily pull it out and use it.
The other thing they don't mention is disinformation. Phones do not use the encrypted GPS channel, they use the regular one. And spoofing it can make you phone think it is somewhere that it isn't. Cell tower data screws with that (since if you cross correlate to cell tower pings you end up with conflicting data sets) but within the range of a tower its eminently doable. The recent 'drone hijack' example had an idea of how much it costs ($1K) to build a reasonably high powered GPS spoofer, to spoof the phone in your pocket would take a very small one (and no sense screwing up your neighbors phone right?).
All we need are a couple of cases where the cell phone data "proves" you weren't in the area of a crime and blam!
It's actually hard & somewhat expensive to buy a foil pouch that cuts of signal completely. I've bought a $20 one to simulate cellular cut off situations, and it didn't work reliably.
Maybe try wrapping your phone in tinfoil? If that doesn't work, maybe try two layers. And if that doesn't work, perhaps you could also try a tinfoil hat.
Tinfoil doesn't work at all, since the stuff sold in stores today is actually aluminium foil and doesn't block radio signals. Go try it with your phone, use the entire roll, you'll see pretty quickly it doesn't do much.
I bought the pouch for software development reasons, not paranoia. One that works properly is something around $100 dollars. Leaving your phone in that kind of pouch is actually not that great for battery life, since I think the phone searches for towers on full radio strength. It's better just to activate airplane mode.
The stuff has been aluminium for a century, but that doesn't make any difference to its RF blocking abilities - Al is actually rather better.
The trick is to wrap it so that there are no gaps, phone signals will get out of tiny gaps.
... of course before even tin "tinfoil" things were tough. Mother would be stood over her anvil in the kitchen battering the wrought iron over the tops of left-overs
So, I don't know a lot about the internal workings of these phones, but I was under the impression that a phone manages its transmit power depending on the signal strength.
IF that's the case: Wouldn't your solution turn the device into a pocket heater that dies a couple of hours early?
What is the benefit of this 'clever' solution, if all you really want seems to be to turn it off..?
Phones generally "give up" if they have basically no power. I spend significant chunks of time in rural areas with no service, and battery life isn't ever a problem.
Subjecting a real problem to faintly ridiculous exaggeration and paranoia does not help. (I'm not sure whether to be surprised this made it into the New York Times or not.)
> Thanks to the explosion of GPS technology and smartphone apps, these devices are also taking note of what we buy, where and when we buy it, how much money we have in the bank, whom we text and e-mail, what Web sites we visit, how and where we travel, what time we go to sleep and wake up — and more. Much of that data is shared with companies that use it to offer us services they think we want.
I have never heard of purchase history, bank balance, alarm clock settings (??? perhaps it refers to carriers supposedly tracking waking hours based on usage? that would make more sense, but is no different from dumb phones), or website history being tracked by anyone through a smartphone. "Whom we text" is tracked, but "whom we email" is worth highlighting as an item that cannot be tracked by a carrier without installing malware onto your phone, assuming you use encrypted email. (The credit card company is tracking your purchases, and email providers may be tracking your email, depending on privacy policy, whether you're using a smartphone or not, but that's irrelevant. I guess if you count Gmail's algorithms reading email to offer services "they think we want"... I don't.)
> Scholars have called them minicomputers and robots. Everyone is struggling to find the right tag, because “cellphone” and “smartphone” are inadequate.
That "phone" doesn't adequately describe modern smartphones is a valid point, but has literally nothing to do with tracking.
> Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, argues that they are robots for which we — the proud owners — are merely the hands and feet. “They see everything, they’re aware of our position, our relationship to other human beings and other robots, they mediate an information stream around us,” he has said.
Colorful, but ridiculously vague. There are many different types of information and they are all stored differently. With the possible exception of Facebook, there is no entity that sits up high reading all your stuff without a court order, and if you want to have completely secure conversations through email or other means it's easy to do so.
> A recent survey by O2, a British cell carrier, showed that making calls is the fifth-most-popular activity for smartphones; more popular uses are Web browsing, checking social networks, playing games and listening to music. Smartphones are taking over the functions that laptops, cameras, credit cards and watches once performed for us.
Also irrelevant to tracking.
> Turning it off when you’re not using it will also help, because it will cease pinging your location to the cell company, but are you really going to do that? Shutting it down does not even guarantee it’s off — malware can keep it on without your realizing it. The only way to be sure is to take out the battery. Guess what? If you have an iPhone, you will need a tiny screwdriver to remove the back cover. Doing that will void your warranty.
If you are really concerned about malware preventing you from turning off your iPhone, you can hold down the home and power buttons to turn it off without going through software.
> “Don’t have a cellphone or just accept that you’re living in the Panopticon.”
A third alternative is to wear a tinfoil hat which will stop all the tracking???
> There is another option. People could call them trackers.
Okay but if hackers start hijacking peoples' sessions can we start calling them tracker-jackers?
Edit: Or more to the point - this is like calling all passerby "government agents" because they can be required to testify in court.
Having total control over your own phone doesn't resolve the more fundamental problem that, in order to do basic tasks such as make calls or send text messages, you are dependent on a cell phone provier who then, through ordinary usage, is able to collect a terrifying amount of data about you.
They can triangulate your location whenever your phone is on and connected to their network (24/7 for most people), and have a full record of your calls, text messages, as well as all the data you send through their network.
54 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadWhat I find strange about this (common) question is that nobody seems to remember what they did before mobile phones. I got my first mobile phone in 2001, but it's not like I was chained to my house from birth until 2001.
I admit I might be more wary if I lived in a suburban or rural area where I could end up broken down in a car miles from civilization. Then a phone is a nice backup.
The $0.10 minutes that come with that aren't especially competitive with other prepaid services. I'm not sure they will activate a phone everywhere.
But the 'have a working phone' baseline isn't all that inconvenient or all that expensive.
The phone simply being turned on doesn't equate to more calls being made. Like the parent said, turn it on when you need it.
"The FCC's basic 911 rules require wireless service providers to transmit all 911 calls to a PSAP, regardless of whether the caller subscribes to the provider’s service or not." http://www.fcc.gov/guides/wireless-911-services/
Doesn't cover calling a tow truck, AAA, or a friend or relative to come pick you up. But if you only use the phone for real life-threatening emergencies, you don't have to pay.
I can't off-hand think of anything where contacting me personally would be required in an "emergency situation", if it's really an "emergency" there's probably better qualified people to call. This is colored by my situation, I'm not a parent, I'm not the sole decision maker for anything mission critical (either personally or professionally). I'd be sad (or sadder) if my Mum or Dad died and I missed out on saying goodbye because nobody could contact me immediately, but they live 5hrs away from me so that's a pretty unlikely scenario.
I'm kinda "at peace" with spending time "uncontactable" anyway, I spend at least an hour a day (and sometimes 8 or 10 hours) on a motorcycle - where I might feel my phone ringing in my pocket, but I don't answer it until I've got to where I'm going and stopped the bike. I also treat the phone the same way in movies/restaurants/gigs/meetings, and often while deep in something complicated at work.
Personally, I don't buy into the idea that my phone is so other people can reliably contact me immediately in case of emergency. When work wants that, it's called "on-call" and they pay me for it. In my personal life, I answer my phone if and when it suits me, and I'm not enslaved to anybody who happens to have my number.
I've found out that most times when I "urgently" want to get a hold of someone - leaving a well thought out message works out just as fine.
I honestly can't believe it when people ask that question. It's such a scare tactic.
By itself, at least for me, this would probably really limit my social life. I'd miss spontaneous texts and calls like "I'm in your neighborhood, want to grab tea?" But I wonder if this airplane mode trick, plus a VoIP app, plus some kind of internet-based text message replacement, might solve the problem. Has anyone tried this?
And Google's Streetview wifi data hoovering means thay've got a pretty good database of wifi access points to geographic co-ordinates. And I bet they're not the only ones building that database. I'd bet pretty good money that there was no ethical oversight or data retention/protection policy in place befre this started: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/security/police-t...
Near as I can tell, the privacy threat here is very specific. You come within a few hundred feet of a hotspot, and for as long as you are in that location, the hotspot receives polling messages with your MAC address. The hotspot's operator can in theory log information like "device with MAC address 00:11:22:33:44:55 was within a few hundred feet of [hotspot location], Sat Jul 14 from 00:29:05 to 01:13:22".
How big of a threat this is depends on:
1. The difficulty of mapping a phone's MAC address to an individual. Do we know this is easy? Is there a big database with this information? A quick search suggests that it's possible to spoof the MAC address on a rooted phone, so it could be configured to change randomly every few hours. That would seem to defeat this attack on privacy, though doing so may be outside the technical know-how of most people.
2. How common is it for those who operate hotspots to log, aggregate and share this data? I'm confident the locally-owned cafe down the street doesn't log this data. What if it's something corporate-owned, like a Starbucks? Is this kind of logging, sharing and aggregating to track users just a theoretical possibility, or is it actually commonplace? I'd suspect the former.
I don't have answers to the questions I posed above. But barring evidence to the contrary, I strongly suspect that setting a smartphone to wifi only makes location tracking go from trivial to at least moderately difficult.
I suppose that you might be able to try tunneling all of your outbound data through a VPN tunnel, but at that point you might as well go back to using internet cafes and phone booths.
I prefer misdirection. Set up a device that will appear to be 'you' in many places at once. For instance, google and facebook both routinely believe that I commute from New York to London at least 15 times a day.
There is no doubt it inconvenient at times, but on the whole, I find my life better without one.
I think of them like cable TV - you're paying money for something to keep you in the daily grind of going to work, an you don't actually need it.
I spend a lot of time working at my laptop all day, and I don't want another full-blown computer in my pocket to suck my attention when I'm away from my laptop. Typically when I'm away from my laptop I'm busy with something--taking a walk in the park, drinking with frinds--that I don't want interrupted.
I also find that I can live perfectly fine without calls. I schedule things in advance with my girlfriend/friends, and email is enough for that. Maybe there's been one or two times in the past few years where I've really truly needed a phone (and I can't remember a specific case, but I assume there must have been such a time!).
The word "tracker" doesn't roll off the tongue very well and I think it suffers from the same flaw that the article criticizes about "phone", namely that it focuses on a specific aspect of a multi-purpose device. Node seems a much better choice since it connotes all the important aspects of a smart phone:
If we choose to find a more suitable name, I'd suggest maybe "Personal Node" or "Smart Node".I wonder if Google are collecting geo-spacial data about your social graph? I suspect they could, if they wanted to, work out which section of your online social network are people you meet in real life, and which are people you only interact with on-line?
"Tracker" simply ignores all the service aspects of the device and focuses on a single use for one of the parties involved (costumer, carrier, manufacturer). In that respects it is just as misleading a term as "phone".
The other thing they don't mention is disinformation. Phones do not use the encrypted GPS channel, they use the regular one. And spoofing it can make you phone think it is somewhere that it isn't. Cell tower data screws with that (since if you cross correlate to cell tower pings you end up with conflicting data sets) but within the range of a tower its eminently doable. The recent 'drone hijack' example had an idea of how much it costs ($1K) to build a reasonably high powered GPS spoofer, to spoof the phone in your pocket would take a very small one (and no sense screwing up your neighbors phone right?).
All we need are a couple of cases where the cell phone data "proves" you weren't in the area of a crime and blam!
I bought the pouch for software development reasons, not paranoia. One that works properly is something around $100 dollars. Leaving your phone in that kind of pouch is actually not that great for battery life, since I think the phone searches for towers on full radio strength. It's better just to activate airplane mode.
... of course before even tin "tinfoil" things were tough. Mother would be stood over her anvil in the kitchen battering the wrought iron over the tops of left-overs
IF that's the case: Wouldn't your solution turn the device into a pocket heater that dies a couple of hours early?
What is the benefit of this 'clever' solution, if all you really want seems to be to turn it off..?
> Thanks to the explosion of GPS technology and smartphone apps, these devices are also taking note of what we buy, where and when we buy it, how much money we have in the bank, whom we text and e-mail, what Web sites we visit, how and where we travel, what time we go to sleep and wake up — and more. Much of that data is shared with companies that use it to offer us services they think we want.
I have never heard of purchase history, bank balance, alarm clock settings (??? perhaps it refers to carriers supposedly tracking waking hours based on usage? that would make more sense, but is no different from dumb phones), or website history being tracked by anyone through a smartphone. "Whom we text" is tracked, but "whom we email" is worth highlighting as an item that cannot be tracked by a carrier without installing malware onto your phone, assuming you use encrypted email. (The credit card company is tracking your purchases, and email providers may be tracking your email, depending on privacy policy, whether you're using a smartphone or not, but that's irrelevant. I guess if you count Gmail's algorithms reading email to offer services "they think we want"... I don't.)
> Scholars have called them minicomputers and robots. Everyone is struggling to find the right tag, because “cellphone” and “smartphone” are inadequate.
That "phone" doesn't adequately describe modern smartphones is a valid point, but has literally nothing to do with tracking.
> Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, argues that they are robots for which we — the proud owners — are merely the hands and feet. “They see everything, they’re aware of our position, our relationship to other human beings and other robots, they mediate an information stream around us,” he has said.
Colorful, but ridiculously vague. There are many different types of information and they are all stored differently. With the possible exception of Facebook, there is no entity that sits up high reading all your stuff without a court order, and if you want to have completely secure conversations through email or other means it's easy to do so.
> A recent survey by O2, a British cell carrier, showed that making calls is the fifth-most-popular activity for smartphones; more popular uses are Web browsing, checking social networks, playing games and listening to music. Smartphones are taking over the functions that laptops, cameras, credit cards and watches once performed for us.
Also irrelevant to tracking.
> Turning it off when you’re not using it will also help, because it will cease pinging your location to the cell company, but are you really going to do that? Shutting it down does not even guarantee it’s off — malware can keep it on without your realizing it. The only way to be sure is to take out the battery. Guess what? If you have an iPhone, you will need a tiny screwdriver to remove the back cover. Doing that will void your warranty.
If you are really concerned about malware preventing you from turning off your iPhone, you can hold down the home and power buttons to turn it off without going through software.
> “Don’t have a cellphone or just accept that you’re living in the Panopticon.”
A third alternative is to wear a tinfoil hat which will stop all the tracking???
> There is another option. People could call them trackers.
Okay but if hackers start hijacking peoples' sessions can we start calling them tracker-jackers?
Edit: Or more to the point - this is like calling all passerby "government agents" because they can be required to testify in court.
Eventually it will happen.
Having total control over your own phone doesn't resolve the more fundamental problem that, in order to do basic tasks such as make calls or send text messages, you are dependent on a cell phone provier who then, through ordinary usage, is able to collect a terrifying amount of data about you.
They can triangulate your location whenever your phone is on and connected to their network (24/7 for most people), and have a full record of your calls, text messages, as well as all the data you send through their network.