Aside From Brain Cancer

Your cell phone is a government issued tracking device

"Mobile phones have become a major part of our modern civilization. These hand-held computers have reached a level of sophistication that allows us to instantly communicate through text, voice and video. This same technology is also being used to amass a situational awareness and sensory system that will track you and the world around you. You and your cell phone are nodes in a grid of sensors that paints a virtual picture of the world.

We are offering a huge amount of “human intelligence” to whoever is watching. In days gone by, this information was uncovered by finding the right paperwork and other hard intel. Now that the public has become acclimated to social media, advancing technology and a lesser expectation of privacy, we are collectively offering freely and openly information that is valuable to corporations, marketers, and especially governments. Cell phones are a nexus point for all of this information. As the Economist reports,

“…imagine [your cell phone] being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.”

You post facebook updates from your phone, you post tweets, and you send texts. This information is being used to track social movements, predict crime, and build psychological profiles on individuals. Some phones are even being made that act as breathalyzers.

We have all likely heard about the NSA wiretapping of phone calls, but cell phones and mobile devices offer an entirely new level of real time information. “Social awareness” and geolocation, i.e. the “tagging” of your location with the popular Foursquare app is an example. Police are also scanning cell phones with wireless devices during routine traffic stops. The device can retrieve all photos and video from a cell phone and “…works with 3000 different phone models and can even defeat password protections.”