Why I ditched my smartphone

hi and welcome back to Scotty's take that info I'm Scotty with my co-host Cletus recently there was a video that was released by I think it was like the Tucker Tucker Carlson Tonight Show on Fox and they did a little investigation and a link to the video in the description but in summary they took two to smartphones and both smartphones had the SIM cards removed and one of the smart phones is in airplane mode and the other was not but neither of them were Wi-Fi was off bluetooth it was off no SIM cards no cellular connection one in airplane mode what it knocked and they took these around the Washington DC area for like an hour or something and the reporter went like took like uber or something whatever I don't know drove around and then when they got back to their studio they had this really cool suitcase it was like a Wi-Fi man-in-the-middle suitcase so they they then powered or rather connected both of the smart phones via Wi-Fi to the fancy suitcase and that fancy suitcase is actually recording the data it was recording and decrypting the data that was being sent from the phones through the suitcase to Google and the whole point was to see okay if you have no SIM card and even if your phone is in airplane mode what data is it reporting back to Google right and of course as they mentioned in the report we all know that when you have say like a Google or an apple or Windows or whatever kind of smart phone you have when you like for example when you install or upgrade Android or when you get a new phone the first thing you do like say if it's an Android phone is you type in your Google username and password and then you have to click a button that says I agree to all your Terms of Service and if you read those terms of service essentially what it's saying is I'm agreeing to let you collect data on me because it's what they call surveillance capitalism where basically you are using all your services for free like Gmail and your smartphone and blah blah blah and in return they're collecting gobs of data about you to give you lots of ads to view and click on in the hopes that you will buy stuff and this is how Google makes a lot of its money so and of course we all know these things are happening you know that your browsing history and you know tracking cookies and browser fingerprints which I wrote an article about blah blah blah right I mean we all know this is happening but I was a little bit shocked actually maybe more like horrified because it turns out that when they connected the phone that was not in airplane mode it transmitted 300 kilobytes of data back to Google servers and this data included things like second-by-second metadata but it was actually things like the current barometric pressure it was basically a prediction with a percentage of like on foot or it would say like in vehicle or got out of car that's not what they called it but it was basically it was saying you know exited vehicle probability 100% and this was all there was a whole list of all this data that it was gathering so and of course this kind of makes sense because we know that smartphones have all these little sensors they have like gyroscopes and then they have accelerometers in it so if you start with your cell phone before you take the SIM card out and of course it's it has recorded its location you power off the phone you take the SIM card out you turn it back on again even if it's not connected to anything basically like if you've got your smart phone and it can record its orientation and its acceleration then if you have a starting point or an ending point or both you can calculate the route that the person took right and it's like yeah I guess you know we kind of knew this was happening but I was a little bit shocked that even when a phone is not connected to any network and even when it's in airplane mode it's still gathering all this data and it's using its using processing power it's using battery life it's using basically everything that's in the phone to track you down to like the you know the meter and and to record and relay literally everything you do and everywhere you go and the extra interesting part about the report was that in terms of they had the two phones like I said and one was an airplane mode and one was not the one that was in airplane mode actually recorded more data and sent more data back to Google than the one that was not in airplane mode it's just like and I suppose you could say well this kind of makes sense because there's a misconception about airplane mode I I did a couple videos on how to make a Faraday box to keep your smartphone in to prevent it from connecting and I'll link to that down in the description too and a lot of people said we'll just put it in airplane mode and I think like yeah some people I think don't understand that airplane mode all it means is that the phone is not allowed to transmit but even that is iffy because yeah it gets a little complicated because these guys had two phones and the one that was in airplane mode was recording more data right well if the phone is in airplane mode that doesn't mean it can't receive signals from GPS because smart phones usually have what's called a GPS or assisted GPS so a normal GPS receiver it never actually transmits it only receives signals from the satellites up above and based on the multiple signals it receives it calculates its position it also receives actual like satellite position data first then it receives kind of like positioning signals like on an ongoing basis and from this it calculates your position on the surface of the earth right a GPS the assisted part that's this this a GPS that's used in smart phones it actually uses I think it's either Wi-Fi or usually the cellular network to receive satellite data that the satellites would normally transmit the a GPS can actually receive it through the cellular network so it locks on quicker but even if that's missing if the phone is in airplane mode technically it could just activate the the integrated GPS receiver and it could still track your location and record it and then send it off to Google so airplane mode is not necessarily foolproof and furthermore there it was a couple of years ago there's a setting usually at least an Android for enhanced location and there is this big hullabaloo because basically what somebody discovered was that an enhanced location is basically the same thing as a GPS it's like it's recording your location but every time it uses the GPS receiver it's going to drain your battery faster so the idea was that this assisted location would or enhance location whatever they call it it would actually use again signals from I think it was like local open Wi-Fi hotspots and it would somehow grab some data so it would help help track your location without having to fire up the actual integrated GPS and the hullaballoo came from the fact that the when you turn this option off apparently the phone was still every now I'm and connecting to open Wi-Fi networks and getting the data anyway even though you said don't do this turn it off so this is kind of like a known thing where yeah you tell it do this and it doesn't really do that and they kind of fudge a little bit yeah so I I mean like I say like we all knew that Google was doing this and and of course they're tracking and that's that's why Google services are free and stuff and but I was a little bit horrified because it's like well do you really need to know every little place I go and furthermore you're sitting there using my phone you're using my battery life you're using all the processing power you're using the the sensors to gather data even when I'm not connected so that later you can upload it all so that like what you know I mean okay so sure it's just for advertising right but okay let's say it is just for advertising it's still a little bit over the top right you don't need to know that I go by that I went to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk or something it's it's just is that really gonna help you give me better ads I mean so yeah that was um kind of surprising and I what I did actually is I bought a dumb phone because I pretty much decided I'd had enough now I have to say that I am not your typical smartphone user I have a smartphone usually a Nexus phone because I like to get the latest version of Android and mostly because I'm a nerd but in terms of using my smart phone I don't actually I'm not one of those people that like carries it around with me and has my nose buried in the touchscreen all the time if I basically go out I take my phone with me I turned it on and I even rarely use many of these smart features I'm not like addicted to what's happened all this other nonsense like so but of course that's my smartphone and it's it's my camera and it also happens to be used for my time like and you know it's it's very handy for certain things but um so you know like I'm one of those people who would be I'd be like sitting on a train and I might take my phone out and I go tappy tappy tappy ok whatever and then put it away and I'm actually sitting there looking around and like everyone on the train is like their nose is buried in their phone and and it's like just there's no one actually talk to each other anymore is it is it like you know I mean there's also this kind of like addiction factor that's a little bit crazy which of course works very well in Google's Google favor and yeah I would be you know I'm usually like sitting on a train you know next to some attractive woman or something and and she's got her she's got her phone out and everything and I'm sitting there going like oh I sure would like to talk to her but I we should put her damn phone down and she's probably sitting there going like this thumbs all a blur you know like oh my god this guy is so cute but I sure wish she'd pick up his phone and fire up like Facebook Messenger so that I could talk to him and you know it's it's all just anyway so what I did is I bought a dumb phone and this is this is actually a caterpillar b30 and it's yeah it's it's got a camera and a mic and everything but it doesn't have its 3G it was about 70 bucks so it was cheap and it's a cell phone and the only thing it has is Bluetooth hands-free it does not have Wi-Fi it does not have GPS it does not have anything it's basically just a simple little phone and you can use it as a phone and yeah 70 bucks and it's pretty cool because it also happens to be dust proof it's waterproof down to one meter for up to 30 minutes you can drop it from a height of 1.8 meters which is good because I'm 1.89 meters tall so and it won't break and it's kind of like indestructible and it's also much smaller and much lighter than my smartphone so it doesn't take up all the space in my pocket and so there you go I've pretty much had it with with smartphones and I've decided that dumb phone it is I will note that you know because some people are gonna say yeah but they can still track you by the cell phone network yes that's true they can they the thing is that tracking via the cell phone network requires like triangulation and blah blah blah right so that's a little bit more complicated if it doesn't have Wi-Fi and it doesn't have you know yadda yadda it's gonna be harder to track and especially if it's not running say Android wear basically this is Android is an operating system on the smartphone that's literally designed to track and record and transmit everything you do whereas this runs on a proprietary operating system and because it's a very simple phone that's far far less likely to happen so basically instead of making it super easy to be tracked I'm making it a little bit more difficult but it's also just kind of like yeah I've kind of had enough you know and I don't really need the smartphone anyway and yeah so that's what I did dumb phone for more techie tipsy Scotty's take that info thanks for watching and see you next time

Channel: ScottiesTech.Info

Views: 288,344

Keywords: smartphone, google, surveillance capitalism, dumbphone, android

Id: wd_lhqi2NcA

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018