Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

A new piece of tech from a company in Spain is proving very effective for people involved in search and rescue. It's effectively a portable cell 'tower' that can be mounted on a helicopter in very little time, claimed three minutes. The concept is to get the lost people's phones to connect to the tower - which the device can detect from twenty miles away(!), then by circling the area the device detects, they can quickly zero in on where the people are.

How quickly?

During a test mission, they found their 'lost people' in two minutes and 14 seconds!

The portable phone tower also allows text-based broadcasts from the helicopter, allowing the rescuers to instruct the lost people to move to a clearing for the helicopter to land, or stay in place if there are injured people, etc.

This is a very cool tool, and I expect will be helpful in saving lives. It can also be used to fly over areas and broadcast messages about impending flash floods or fires, etc.

Privacy implications. Pretty minimal, as far as the article reveals. This is not a Stingray device, it doesn't capture, intercept and record all cell traffic in an area. It looks for a phone's beacon, detects it, and uses directional antennas/analysis localizes it and can send text messages - much lower power requirement and longer range than voice comms so the lost people's battery will last longer. I don't think this will have any application in law enforcement or surveillance. But I could be wrong.

https://coloradosun.com/2024/05/28/new-technology-search-rescue-helicopters/

https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/05/29/0543211/new-tech-may-help-find-missing-people-in-the-backcountry-within-minutes

The Colorado Sun article has a very good description of the broad usage of the device, the Slashdot story has some good technical description of how such a device could work and why it would take a long time to bring such a thing to market.

They were caught selling, without permission, the constant location data of you, me, everyone in the USA with a mobile phone to aggregators who then sold it on to more people, again, without our permission.

From the article: "The FCC’s findings against AT&T, for example, show that AT&T sold customer location data directly or indirectly to at least 88 third-party entities. The FCC found Verizon sold access to customer location data (indirectly or directly) to 67 third-party entities. Location data for Sprint customers found its way to 86 third-party entities, and to 75 third-parties in the case of T-Mobile customers." Note that the discovery and scope of the investigation was before and during the T-Mobile/Sprint merger.

SO. Let's break this down. Krebs provides a link to the FCC web site that lists the formal announcement of the fines. In which, it includes the specific breakdown per carrier. In this case, Verizon, my carrier, was fined almost $47 million dollars US.

I asked Microsoft's Bing AI Co-Pilot to do a little math for me.

In 2023, Verizon Wireless reported net profit of $76.7 billion dollars US. I wanted to know how long it would take, in seconds, for Verizon to make that much money. Now, this is net profit. Here's Bing's response:

... it would take Verizon Wireless approximately 18,879 seconds (or about 5 hours and 14 minutes) to earn $46 million from their annual revenue of $76.7 billion

Five and a quarter hours. That's 1/32nd of a WEEK. An utterly insignificant rounding error.

The percentage of the fine versus 2023 gross profit? 0.058% One-seventeenth of ONE PERCENT of their profit. There's a reason why it's called gross profit.

Oh, and just how much was their gross profit? $79.087 billion USD. So it cost them $3 billion in people, equipment, trucks, tower rentals, FCC airwave licenses, etc. to generate $76bUSD in net profit. I should take a look at their stock ticker over the last few years, I expect it ain't going down.

I'm in the wrong line of work.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/04/fcc-fines-major-u-s-wireless-carriers-for-selling-customer-location-data/

An excellent article on how your private data gets shared and what you can do about it.

The WHY you should is pretty simple: 9 million AT&T customers were compromised in a hack at an advertising affiliate, T-Mobile has had 70 million accounts compromised in the last decade or so, etc.

These data breeches are so common as to be ridiculous. And that information can be used against you in possible fraud schemes. As an article that I posted recently said, Americans lost a record amount to fraud schemes in 2022, and breeches like these help fuel said schemes.

The article explains how to opt-OUT of data sharing for the Big Three: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/why-you-should-opt-out-of-sharing-data-with-your-mobile-provider/