On the same day that the bulk collection and storage of US phone records was struck down by the second circuit court of appeals we’ve also had a privacy setback. John Iadarola (Think Tank), Jimmy Dore (The Jimmy Dore Show), Ana Kasparian (The Point,) discusses the details of the story. Do you think you should own the content on your phone? Tell us what you think in the comment section below.
Read more here: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/05/06/blow_to_cellphone_privacy_flip_flop_court_case_says_data_belongs_to_your.html
“A U.S. court has handed privacy advocates a surprising reversal on a landmark pro-privacy decision: Last year, the court ruled against the government in the case of Quartavious Davis, whose cellphone was tracked by cops as he went on a three-month robbery spree. Privacy advocates celebrated that result as a new anti-snooping legal precedent. But now prosecutors could use the same court’s opposite finding to instead justify warrantless snooping on your cellphone’s location.
In a decision published Tuesday, a panel of 11th circuit judges overturned the ruling the same circuit court made last year in U.S. vs. Davis, which found that obtaining Davis’ past cellphone location without a warrant violated his Fourth Amendment right to privacy. The new ruling instead finds that because Davis’ phone location data wasn’t Davis’ property, but the property of his phone carrier, MetroPCS—a legal argument known as the “third party doctrine”—he had no expectation of that data’s privacy, and the cops tracking him didn’t in fact need a warrant.”*
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Comments
I am just as outraged as everyone, but there is a big distinction between the “phone” data and the “data” owned by the the carrier, which seems to be what the argument is over.
With a cell phone, in order to drive down the highway and talk on the phone (or in some large cities like NYC walking), your phone is “tracked” not for some nefarious reason but because the carrier needs to determine what cell tower you are on to ensure smoother service. This is not data in your phone and therefore it is not “cell phone data” as we think of it.
This data IS owned by the cell phone network (i.e., AT&T, Verizon, etc). When you purchase a cell phone and join a network, there is no expectation of privacy. Anyone with the right equipment can pull the signal out of the air and if they know the protocols used by that carrier, they can decode the data stream (it’s not easy but it can be done).
As far as Jimmy’s comment about your house or your car, the comparison would not be the bank who technically “owns” the property. The equivalent would be the Electric company. You use a certain amount of electricity each day/week/month and the Electric Company can read that information. That is information that belongs to THEM and the records need to be kept by them for their business purposes.
If you are doing business with a public company, in many cases you have no expectation of privacy, it is left to the company as to whether they wish to turn over those records.
In this particular case (and generally). they are not talking about digging into your phone and reading all the data on it. When you send data via a cellphone, generally there is a wrapper which lets the network know where the data starts, where its going, how long it is and what type it is (voice or data). Then follows the data and a “end data” indicator, followed by a number that is used to determine if the “message” is valid (uncorrupted). The cell phone companies can’t and don’t store the actual contents. When you send a picture to snapchat, only snapchat stores the data. The phone carriers have neither the space nor the time to store/read everything being sent. They also really don’t care.
you are being tracked for both reasons, because they need to track your phone to make it work better, and because of nefarious reasons. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.