Anyone want a cell phone that won't track them? Even if it takes effort? Step inside.

This was brought up in the first autonomous crash death thread, I responded to SVreX about what would be required to make an untrackable cell phone - basically it's not possible on the phone end, it's up to the telco to restrict access to, and not-record your cell phone's location. Your phone's transmissions could still be triangulated by spooks with radios, but there wouldn't be a convenient detailed log of where you've been ready to pull up from the telecom's network on request as there is today.

Then I thought, there are already ways to own an untrackable cell phone, for certain values of "cell phone."

Cellular networks need to know where the phone is physically in order to work, to make a long story short. It's trivial to store and share that information, and thus the privacy nightmare is born. If you can make calls without using a cellular network on the other hand, you can avoid this problem. The solution is VoIP and Wifi (ideally with a plan for a public wifi service, if you want half-decent coverage).

If you get a SIP account at your VoIP provider and connect it to a client on your cell phone, you can send and receive calls and the VoIP provider, if they wish, could only log the IP address you've logged in from. This could be traced to a rough physical location with a lot of work however.

So the next step in improving privacy would be to tunnel the VoIP traffic through a VPN service. This way the VoIP provider will only see the IP address of the VPN provider. Your VPN provider will have access to the same IP address information you're now hiding from your VoIP provider, but there are VPN services available from eastern-European providers who promise to never log your IP information.

If that's not good enough, you can move up to the next step, which is somewhat theoretical - running your VoIP traffic through a darknet instead of a VPN. Performance-wise it might not work well, most darknets are slow and laggy due to the nature of how they work - the only "fast" one I'm aware of is I2P and it's not (yet) capable of passing VoIP traffic through outproxies. If it performs well enough, the IP address visible to the VoIP provider would be constantly changing and never trace to your physical location (unless the exit point happens to be near you by chance ). If your VoIP traffic is encrypted, even the NSA could have a bloody hard time finding you.

Of course all of this work could be undone if you allow tracking through other methods, such as by installing any app on your phone that tracks your location (which is probably a majority of commercial apps, not counting those included with your phone that have location-tracking capability). Also you'd be likely to lose connectivity fairly often if you're out of range of wifi - in other words, if you're not a city-dweller. But it is possible. I actually have a plain VoIP connection from my personal cell phone to my office VoIP server - using this, I could make calls without a cellular connection.

The safest way to communicate anonymously and privately over distance is good old snail mail with no return address and a cipher.

A clean ROM and Signal works to make snooping difficult but location is a tricky one as you point out - wifi triangulation isn't that hard with equipment and access but it's not accurate to more than a general area. The ToR network won't perform well enough to do video/voice comm but it works for IM messaging so - Signal routed thru ToR can do a decent job provided whomever you are talking to is using it also.

.onion FTW

But what is the tracking worth if you can't tell WHO you are tracking?

For example, what if I only use a prepaid cell phone that was not originally bought by me, and I fill it with minutes by buying recharge cards at low end convenience stores with cash? And replace frequently?

I'm sure you could quickly setup an almost never-ending supply of used prepay cell phones.

Or heck, just use your VOIP phone but use a secondhand prepay data phone for the data signal.

Robbie wrote: But what is the tracking worth if you can't tell WHO you are tracking? For example, what if I only use a prepaid cell phone that was not originally bought by me, and I fill it with minutes by buying recharge cards at low end convenience stores with cash? And replace frequently? I'm sure you could quickly setup an almost never-ending supply of used prepay cell phones. Or heck, just use your VOIP phone but use a secondhand prepay data phone for the data signal.

It's true, there won't be a name on the bill. But it could be possible to correlate phone numbers and locations to find out who the person is.

Criminals call a phone purchased in this manner a "burner phone" - I don't think it's still legal to buy cell phone plans anonymously in the US though. It hasn't been in other countries for a long time.

Buy $10 tracfone and however many minutes you want. Pay cash and be unknown.

Throw away and replace whenever you feel paranoid.

Looks like burner phones are still legal in the US, now that I check up on it. This hasn't passed as far as I can find:

http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/225586-proposed-bill-would-block-anonymous-sale-of-burner-phones-in-us

But taking your name off the bill is not privacy, it's a speedbump, don't kid yourself.

Given that my phone conversations are totally uninteresting I'm pretty "meh" about the whole thing.

If I did feel the need to carry on privately, a cash bought burner phone would be my go-to. But honestly, someone who is trying too hard to stay "hidden" from the feds is exactly the person I'd like them to take a closer look at.

KyAllroad wrote: Given that my phone conversations are totally uninteresting I'm pretty "meh" about the whole thing. If I did feel the need to carry on privately, a cash bought burner phone would be my go-to. But honestly, someone who is trying too hard to stay "hidden" from the feds is exactly the person I'd like them to take a closer look at.

They do, but unfortunately this results in them putting too much attention on security researchers, cypherpunks and other computer hobbyists, and not enough on terrorists who generally don't use anything more complicated than codewords.

Finding a way to get VoIP to work over the deep Web would be the best bet. Using a deep Web accessible email to not link it to an accessible email with personal info, of course. Then I'd suggest only using it over wifi. At that it isn't 100% untraceable.

There is always someone who can be coerced into sharing your location weather it be cell tower triangulation or GPS. Very illegal either way.

And honestly, I popped in for curiosity sake. Trace me all you want.

Here are some complimenting products.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Whisper_Systems

Endorsed by Edward Snowden...

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has endorsed Open Whisper Systems' applications on multiple occasions. In his keynote speech at SXSW in March 2014, he praised TextSecure and RedPhone for their ease-of-use.

https://whispersystems.org

Carrier pigeon is the only way to retain your privacy these days. Soon though, the drones will sneak up on them and read your notes in flight.

FWIW, the traffic monitors that tell you how many minutes until downtown/next major interstate base their data off of Bluetooth pings. Some people worry about OMG TRACKED, but there is simply so MUCH data being dealt with that nobody's going to bother correlating anything. Molecules of water in a river. Mostly I think that the people who worry have extremely overinflated ideas of how important they are. You're one guy driving down this road, there's 500,000 other people going to drive down it today, you're not special.

I have a wonderfully non-trackable cell phone. It's really flaky, and mainly seems to only work if plugged in. I turn it on if I need to make a phone call then turn it off again, if it doesn't shut off by itself.

You don't even want to know what government does tracking wise with all the DNA that you routinely flush down the toilet. They have you all sucked in with running water thinking it's for sanitation, hygiene and convenience.

No, I'm probably not being tracked or monitored, but that's not the same thing as saying I can't be tracked or monitored.

If you've ever been on the radar of "the man", it's an interesting experience, and one you're likely to not want to repeat.

What about encrypted voice service via WhatsApp? Is that traceable?

I've used it by accident, and it's a pain to disconnect. Must be the govt preventing my hangup.

Whatever this means

I'm more concerned about Google tracking me than our government.

Encrypted things, including voice service via WhatsApp is traceable, but not necessarily understandable.

Sorta akin to being able to observe two people speaking in a foreign language. You can tell they are talking and even hear it, but you can't understand it.

Tracing is simply a matter of knowing the device and towers. The receiving device is figured out from the transmission of the 1st device and towers. I.E., I can be traced location wise by them simply knowing my phone number. They can trace its connection to the towers. If I call my wife, they can trace that call via the connection and know I called my wife, and where she is (what tower she's connected to). If the phones are fancy enough to have GPS capabilities (not all do) they can turn that on silently and get a more accurate location.

I like being tracked. I work all over the place and half the time nobody except the person I'm working for has a clue where I am. Sometimes it sucks working alone for people you don't know that call you out of the blue. I'm always a little paranoid I could fall off a ladder, or down a hole, or even worse get mangled by a serial killer in a clown suit, and nobody would find me until its too late. My wife can look on the computer and find my cell phone any time she wants. FWIW, the crazy cat lady hoarder types all seem to get my name off of Facebook because someone recommended me. I always tell my customers to only recommend me to people they know personally and not over an internet chat to some faceless person looking for a plumber, but some people think they are doing you a favor and getting you more work. Today I'm off to an empty house with a pitbull, but I've been assured the dog "shouldn't" bother you. Can't wait to see how this works out after I let myself in through a bulkhead door around the back.

I'm comfortable with being tracked or located by my wife, my son, or a few of the other people I've given permission to for them to do this. Especially since I've a habit of going off on the motorcycle for long rides that sometimes don't have me coming home in time for supper, or even bed time occasionally. It's nice for her to be able to check and see I'm wandering along at 40 mph several states over and apparently still alive and doing well.

That's very different than being tracked and having my emails and texts read and recorded and examined by various government agencies, who are not necessarily doing so because they are concerned with my well being.

Oh this is of interest.

OHSCrifle wrote: What about encrypted voice service via WhatsApp? Is that traceable? I've used it by accident, and it's a pain to disconnect. Must be the govt preventing my hangup. Whatever this means

All whatsapp communications are traceable, as in knowing which IP address was communicating with which, and an IP can be traced to a rough geographical location or even a name by the various three-letter agencies. This is the same for all traffic not passed through a darknet or at least a VPN.

Whatsapp's encryption is pretty good though, it would be very hard to MITM the connection - you'd have to hack into Whatsapp's servers and steal the pinned private key that clients use for initial key exchange, and you'd have to listen in on the intial encrypted connection between two clients (these days, that happens the first time two users start a conversation) to capture the client-generated keys they pass to each other. If you miss the initial key exchange (and all traffic from the initial exchange to the message you want to see) there's no way to decrypt the messages.

foxtrapper wrote: If the phones are fancy enough to have GPS capabilities (not all do) they can turn that on silently and get a more accurate location.

In response to the point of "not all cellphone have GPS capabilities"....

E-911 stands for Enhanced 911. The enhancement is that when you call 911 from a cell phone the handset then GPS's to the operator to give your location withing 300 ft. This enhancement is the goal. In a lot of areas, including my rural hometown, the enhancement has still not been implemented, but...

In about 2009 a rule when into effect that not only do all handsets sold new have to have this GPS capability but the latest version of the rule also stated that you could no longer start new service on a handset that that does not have this capability.

Said another way... If you have been using a phone like shown above continuously since pre-2009 you can still use it but if you have a phone like this in your drawer the phone companies are no longer allowed to start new service on handsets of this vintage.

My point being that even in the simplest flip phone that you can currently buy new there will be GPS tracking capability. It is ultra rare for there to be a currently used handset that does not have GPS capability.

EDIT:
Here is an article from 1998 about the first GPS and E911 handsets coming out.
So, yeah, your handset will have to be over 17 years old to have no built in GPS capability.

captdownshift wrote: You don't even want to know what government does tracking wise with all the DNA that you routinely flush down the toilet. They have you all sucked in with running water thinking it's for sanitation, hygiene and convenience.

And that is why I save all of my toilet and shower water.

E911 Phase II allows for GPS to be used as one of the options There are several other options that can be used. They are basically a triangulation method utilizing multiple towers (U-TDOA, E-OTD, etc).

So no, to this day, not all cell phones have GPS in them, and no law requires them to. Many a smart phone does, but many a cheapie flip phone does not.