Cellphone Privacy Quotes

You have not had any privacy since the first day you owned your first cell phone. They can track everything. They can hear recordings of anything you have ever said on your cell. And read everything you ever read, and everything you ever typed. And see every location you've ever been to. That's just how cells work. Your privacy is a willful illusion.

Sometimes I speak to various regional banks, the ones that are not afraid of bitcoin. They tell me things like 80 percent of our population is a hundred miles from the nearest bank branch and we can’t serve them. In one case, they said a hundred miles by canoe. I’ll let you guess which country that was. Yet, even in the remotest places on Earth, now there is a cell-phone tower. Even in the poorest places on Earth, we often see a little solar panel on a little hut that feeds a Nokia 1000 phone, the most produced device in the history of manufacturing, billions of them have shipped. We can turn every one of those into, not a bank account, but a bank. Two weeks ago, President Obama at South by Southwest did a presentation and he talked about our privacy. He said, ”If we can’t unlock the phones, that means that everyone has a Swiss bank account in their pocket." That is not entirely accurate. I don’t have a Swiss bank account in my pocket. I have a Swiss bank, with the ability to generate 2 billion addresses off a single seed and use a different address for every transaction. That bank is completely encrypted, so even if you do unlock the phone, I still have access to my bank. That represents the cognitive dissonance between the powers of centralized secrecy and the power of privacy as a human right that we now have within our grasp. If you think this is going to be easy or that it’s going to be without struggle, you’re very mistaken.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta reversed itself in a ruling Tuesday, saying that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their historical cellphone location records and so the government needs no warrant to obtain them. The ruling was issued by the full 11-judge court of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, overturning an opinion last year by a three-judge panel. The case arises out of the 2012 conviction

Apple Inc. does not allow iPhone purchasers to use the device as they wish, but as Apple Inc. intends. Dear and fundamental as our cellphone has become to each of use, almost like an extension of our personhood, we don't so much own our phone as lease it under inflexible company made restrictions. Avis is not going to let somebody rebuild a core engine during the term of the rental, right? Well, Apple doesn't want its customers so much as looking under the hood, let alone tinkering with anything.