This is exactly why I refuse to have a "Smart phone." They can be amazingly helpful but you give away too much. I understand that they can be turned on remotely, w/o you knowledge, to spy on you. I use a no contract flip phone I get at Target for $20 with Verizon as a provider. $30 per month unlimited talk and text. I believe its not traceable, and if you lose it or break it, the address's are stored, and you can replace it for....$20 bucks.
Flip phone's in A/P mode, an location/gps off, is the only way to roll. This fuck book you guys talk about whats the draw?
That only helps to a certain degree, you are still being the product to help them make more money.
The cell phone providers and service bundlers / resellers are busy selling your data off.
Selling phone location data from the cell phone providers (which you really can't avoid if the phone is on), is a big business.
If your phone is on, it is being tracked regardless of what "settings" you turn on. More phones than you think track your location everywhere you go regardless of settings. In a dense urban area your phone is easily pinged to within a couple hundred feet at all times.
Also there are more "devices" picking up cell phone pings along the roads and cities than people realize.
In addition the automated licence plate readers you see all over every city around the country are big business for the private companies that run them, you just add licence plate number location records to the phone location records and after a handful of records, you now have what car that phone rides in and can sell that data for more money in bulk as well.
If you bought a phone in cash, turned it on, called another number from a location not at home / work or similar and then tossed it, probably fine, from a commercial selling your data standpoint. (Government or investigating types would at the very least go a step further and see if they can grab security footage of who bought the phone or any cameras operating in the area around the time the phone was turned on / bought).
Most folks don't fully understand how much can be learned about you using "big data" and referencing the huge databases on just about everything and anything that both corporations & governments keep. Your flip phone may not display ads, but the mobile operator probably knows who you are and sells your daily routine / workplace to others who then use it for their own purposes or mail you ads / add you to the list of people needing ad emails.
Say for example your "untraceable" flip phone gets carried in your car back home. The cell phone provider will know basically where you stopped at for the night. Then you drive to work with it, now that number gets matched up to approximate work location. Just from those 2, your back end database automatically starts matching up people that live in this 300 yard radius that are listed as working for xxx company. Then they have you pretty good. Then they can do further work like what other known phones does xxx "disposable phone" often appear in the same place with... then they have your friends and matching up from there.
So while the government angle is easily imagined, from a commercial side it works just as well.
They would like to make extra money from you to help "pay" for that cheap contract.
So they sell off who you are (most likely), where you work tabulated with any income information in the databases, add to that a list of what stores / places you visit, what trips you take, and what you drive. Then sell that off monthly to advertisers looking to add that information to their database for direct mail marketing, or "market research" or to then link up with other platforms spying on you to give you "better deals on flip phones that don't track you". They can also sell off who they think you might meet up with.
Some stock traders found this out the hard way when the government types showed up and said "So.... These "untraceable" cash paid flip phones just so happened to turn on and make calls regularly in a pub you happen to frequent not long after you left your office each time... Oh and somebody might have made a few little other mistakes in what phones shouldn't be left on or where your "normal" phones are at the time.... We'd like to talk to you about somebody letting their buddies know a bit of inside information".
They already have facial recognition working in China to a scary degree, eventually they will roll it out here "quietly" and it will be used for all kinds of commercial purposes, it's not that hard to have your store / mall's security cameras capture faces as they walk in, send it back for processing over at google/amazon, match up with known pictures then use that to determine who to send out more direct mail advertising to.
Add a little cell phone sim number catcher in addition to the wifi MAC address catcher near the door and you are in the big data money.
If it happens to be a bit too over the line... the worst that happens is you get told to stop and pay a small fine which is a tiny bit of what you made from doing it.
