I had a faraday phone case at one point. They also make jackets with faraday inside pockets. I quit using the faraday pouch because if you use that as a convenient off switch, the phone works harder to find a tower, draining batteries. So to save juice you need airplane mode. There’s probably still reason to use a faraday bag along with airplane mode, but since I’ve parted with a GSM chip as well, it’s just not worth it unless you’re someone like edward snowden.

That’s insufficient. Mobile providers are not even getting your location through that Google mechanism that feeds Google. Their towers track your location even if you have GPS off.

I always tap “disagree” to location svcs when turning GPS on and take a hit on slow positioning. But that only cuts Google off. To cut the mobile carriers off, I keep my phone in airplane mode and also keep the GSM chip slot empty. In fact I don’t even carry a gsm chip. I believe in this state I can make emergency calls (IIRC, airplane mode automatically gets disabled when an emergency number is dialed).

Yet a vast majority of people have no problem when people are forced to subscribe to mobile phone service:

https://infosec.pub/post/11658371

This kind of information should be startling enough to at least see the merit in not having a mobile phone subscription. But no, people will just say “that sucks” and continue to being the sucker while also expecting others to be equally naive or cavalier too.

from the article:

AT&T told The Register said it should not be blamed for the failure of those buying its data to obtain proper consent, and said it will fight the fine.

Private investigators are treated as legitimate consumers of that location data. An angry ex-boyfriend or ex-husband hired a PI to find out where his ex was, who then simply bought the location data from a mobile carrier. The guy used the info to find her and shoot her dead on the spot (headshot while she was driving a car). The data sharing was “legit” in that case, in the US where privacy laws are generally non-existent.

It’s strange how that murder case gets omitted in these articles about mobile carriers selling location data.

They’re not at odds. We don’t have to choose between protecting UDHR Art.3 and Art.17. It’s foolish to disregard some portion of the UDHR needlessly and arbitrarily.

The real problem with @[email protected]’s comment was to blame the victim. It may be sensible to blame the victim, but let’s not lose focus on the perp.

Don’t try to strawman this. Human rights are violated when someone is deprived of their property (their data in the case at hand). If food is withheld from starving people in Gaza, your argument is like saying:

“Claims human rights are being violated because someone failed to drive a truck”

beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.ml. And I don’t blame them. I actually try not to post to lemmy.ml or any of the Cloudflare-centralized nodes (lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, lemm.ee, etc) but it slipped my mind when I posted here.

(edit) sorry, i’m confused. I thought beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.ml, but both the post herein and the original are on lemmy.ml yet you can reach this one. So I’m missing something. I wonder if you are able to see infosec.pub-mirrored content and maybe the original community has no infosec subscribers? hard to say.

You’re very trusting of your corporate overlords. I’m sure they are grateful for your steadfast loyalty and trust.

No amount of money you pay for your phone up-front will make that malicious code magically go away. You can pay cash, and you can even tip the seller. The code that reduces your control remains in that device. If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.

If you fail to use rights granted to you by free software licenses, you can blame yourself.

You’re not getting it. Again:

If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.

Buying something does not mean you control it. You might have bought an Amazon Ring doorbell but if Amazon does not like your behavior they can (and will) render it dysfunctional.

If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.

I guess a closer analogy would be rental storage. If you don’t pay your mini storage bill, in some regions the landlord will confiscate your property, holding it hostage until you pay. And if that fails, they’ll even auction off your contents.

So in the case at hand the creditor is holding the debtor’s data hostage. One difference is that the data has no value to the creditor and is not in the creditor’s possession. It would be interesting to know if the contracts in place legally designate the data as the creditor’s property. If not, the data remains the property of the consumer.

This is covered by human rights law. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 17 ¶2:

“No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”

If the phone user did not sign off on repossession of their data, and thus the data remains their property, then the above-quoted human right is violated in the OP’s scenario.

If the creditor wants to collect on a debt, there is a court process for that. I’ve used it. It works.

Locking the phone is not repossession. It does nothing other than sabotage the device the consumer may need to actually make the payment. The phone remains in the buyer’s possession and useless to the seller.

Power is also misplaced. What happens when the creditor decides to (illegally) refuse cash payments on the debt? Defaulting is not necessarily the debtor’s fault. This in fact happened to me: Creditor refused my cash payment and dragged me into court for delinquency. Judge ruled in my favor because cash acceptance is an obligation. But this law is being disregarded by creditors all over. If the creditor had the option to sabotage my lifestyle by blocking communication and computing access, it would have been a greater injustice.

#WarOnCash

You’re still not grasping how free software works. Users have a right to see the code and the right to change it. They also have the right to redistribute the code. Your complaint is unfounded because not a single user of a fully free platform is forced to have remote management code installed.

It should be regulated against by governments. The EU is slowly heading in the right direction. We’re letting these tech companies do whatever the fuck they want to.

I wonder if it already is illegal. Have you looked into that? Did they disclose this “feature” in any of the agreements or literature that came with the device so that you could return it for a refund? Maybe you have a good legal case here.

You don’t own the phone. That’s how credit nonfree software works.

↑ corrected that for you.

The code is inherently in the firmware (edit: kernel) no matter how you acquire the phone.

If you don’t control it, you don’t own it.

Most of my shopping is done at street markets. When a big parking is filled with vans and portable tables on a weekly basis, there is no surveillance. But if I need something very particular then the cash option gets threatened. E.g. I would like to have a Flipper Zero but these are never at street markets and not even on any shelves anywhere.

I wouldn’t choose a custom rom on the sole basis of anti-theft. My ½-baked suggestion was simply disable the playstore framework (so it’s present but just dead code) and installing an app on the side.

Anyway, I have no interest in anti-theft bricking myself. I don’t envision ever having a phone where i would care about the hardware and would not likely spend more than $50 on a phone. Exceptionally I could one day get a Fairphone. But remote bricking does not tempt me. Making the phone a brick more quickly gets the phone into a landfill as it becomes useless for everyone.

It’s worth noting why phones get stolen. Even cheap phones are getting stolen. It’s not for the hardware. It’s because SIM registration makes it hard for criminals to get anonymous burner chips. So they steal phones just for GSM chips that are registered to someone else.