Israeli First Responders in Turkey

 Emergency response combining rapid attention and needed data for complex care and communication. 

Israeli First Responders in Turkey Use Real-Time Tech for Remote Victim Care

Times of Israel, Sharon Wrobel, February 9, 2023

Emergency responders from Israel dispatched to Turkey following the recent earthquake are using cloud-based technology created by Israeli-founded startup Carbyne to share real-time location data, video, and images with remote medical teams in Israel. Zohar Eli at Israeli emergency response nonprofit United Hatzalah said volunteers using Carbyne's system send accurate data to dispatchers, who employ the system's video capabilities "to get better visibility into events on the ground to conduct consultations and provide accurate remote assistance." Emergency responders and remote volunteers use real-time information displayed on a dashboard at the call center to consult with doctors and other Israel-based professional entities on rescue operations conducted in the field.

Full Article     

Criminal Purpose Implied, Detected Via Cellphone Location

Bruce Schneier mentions .... And questions constitutionality ... Useful at the link.

Identifying People Using Cell Phone Location Data

The two people who shut down four Washington power stations in December were arrested. This is the interesting part:

 ... Investigators identified Greenwood and Crahan almost immediately after the attacks took place by using cell phone data that allegedly showed both men in the vicinity of all four substations, according to court documents.  ... 

More and interesting related comment at the link ...

Gecoding Systems: What3Words

 Had the need to look at alternative geocoding systems and came upon 'What3Words' in a closer look at Apple Maps, which supports the method.   This allows the encoding of every square meter of the earth onto a three word code.   See also the wikipedia  article on the method, See also related Amazon App.  Clever idea.  

Geocoding System

What3words  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words 

Part of the What3Words grid on the Palace of Westminster showing typical words and their pseudorandom distribution

Trade name what3words:     Founded 2013; 9 years ago

Website www.what3words.com

What3words is a proprietary geocode system designed to identify any location with a resolution of about 3 metres (9.8 ft). It is owned by What3words Limited, based in London, England. The system encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed dictionary words. For example, the front door of 10 Downing Street in London is identified by ///slurs.this.shark.[1]

What3words differs from most location encoding systems in that it uses words rather than strings of numbers or letters, and the pattern of this mapping is not obvious; the algorithm mapping locations to words is proprietary and protected by copyright.[2]

The company has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API for bidirectional conversion between what3words addresses and latitude/longitude coordinates.  .... '

Location Privacy Challenged by Data From Friends, Strangers

Data From Friends, Strangers Shows Where You Are

Futurity.org, Lindsey Valich, April 11, 2022

An international team of scientists determined that data from friends and strangers can be used to predict someone's location, even when their personal devices' data-tracking functions are inactive. The University of Rochester's Gourab Ghoshal and colleagues analyzed three location-based social network datasets compiling millions of check-ins on applications like Brightkite, Facebook, and Foursquare, and one call-data record with over 22 million calls by almost 36,000 anonymous users. The team applied information theory and measures of entropy to learn that the mobility patterns of people with social ties to an individual incorporate as much as 95% of the data required to anticipate that individual's movements; even data from strangers could be used to predict up to 85% of a person’s movements. ...  

The Value of Phone Location Data

 The Another example of how valuable personal data can be.

ACM NEWS

There's a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone's Location Data

By The Markup, September 30, 2021

Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone. An estimated $12 billion market, the location data industry has many players: collectors, aggregators, marketplaces, and location intelligence firms, all of which boast about the scale and precision of the data that they've amassed.

Location firm Near describes itself as "The World's Largest Dataset of People's Behavior in the Real-World," with data representing "1.6B people across 44 countries." Mobilewalla boasts "40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data." X-Mode's website claims its data covers "25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly."

In an effort to shed light on this little-monitored industry, The Markup has identified 47 companies that harvest, sell, or trade in mobile phone location data. While hardly comprehensive, the list begins to paint a picture of the interconnected players that do everything from providing code to app developers to monetize user data to offering analytics from "1.9 billion devices" and access to datasets on hundreds of millions of people. Six companies claimed more than a billion devices in their data, and at least four claimed their data was the "most accurate" in the industry.

Full article

Alternative use of SpaceX Sats

 Alternative to GPS use for location. 

SpaceX Satellite Signals Used Like GPS to Pinpoint Location on Earth

By Ohio State News,  September 24, 2021

Researchers at The Ohio State University and the University of California, Irvine have come up with a method for locating a position on Earth using signals broadcast by SpaceX's Starlink Internet service satellites. Signals from six Starlink satellites were used to identify a location on Earth within 8 meters, suggesting the method could serve as an alternative to GPS.

Ohio State's Zak Kassas said, "We eavesdropped on the signal, and then we designed sophisticated algorithms to pinpoint our location, and we showed that it works with great accuracy. And even though Starlink wasn't designed for navigation purposes, we showed that it was possible to learn parts of the system well enough to use it for navigation."  ... ' 

From Ohio State News

Removing Location Tracking

Thwarting cellphone tracking.

Is Your Mobile Provider Tracking Your Location? This Technology Could Stop It.

By USC Viterbi School of Engineering, August 16, 2021A new system devised by researchers at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering (USC Viterbi) and Princeton University can thwart the tracking of cellphone users by network operators while maintaining seamless connectivity.

The Pretty Good Phone Privacy software architecture anonymizes personal identifiers sent to cell towers, effectively severing phone connectivity from authentication and billing without altering network hardware.

The system transmits an anonymous, cryptographically signed token in place of a personally identifiable signal to the tower, using a mobile virtual network operator like Cricket or Boost as a substitute or intermediary.

USC Viterbi's Barath Raghavan said, "Now the identity in a specific location is separated from the fact that there is a phone at that location."

The system also ensures that location-based services still function normally.

From USC Viterbi School of Engineering

What3Words Location Database

And we continue to follow up the complexity, security and implications of determining location.  With a system called What3Words, which I had not heard of before.  Described quickly below.  See also: What3words.com

Lost in L.A.? Fire Department Can Find You with What3words Location Technology

CNet, Stephen Shankland, July 22, 2021  in CACM

The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) has entered into a partnership with digital location startup What3words, which assigns a unique three-word name to each of 57 billion 10-foot-square spots on Earth. The department had been testing the application since last year, using it to locate places that emergency crews needed to reach even if the sites lacked conventional addresses. LAFD receives What3words locations through 911 calls on Android phones or iPhones, or through text messages sent by dispatchers with links that retrieve the three-word addresses. People also can use the What3words app to pinpoint their own locations. Increasing numbers of signs identify locations with their What3words designations, particularly in wildlands.

Concerns about QR Codes

Good points.    I had not known that some of this data was always gathered.   We did formally tesgrt the use of QR codes in store to get information about products being purchased.   But at the time things like location data were not captured.  Thinking back, would have been easy to do that.  And as mentioned in a previous comment here:  'Location data is always personal'.   Good example below.

QR Codes Are Here to Stay. So Is the Tracking They Allow.   By The New York Times, July 27, 2021  in the CACM

When people enter Teeth, a bar in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood, the bouncer gives them options. They can order food and drinks at the bar, he says, or they can order via a QR code.

Each table at Teeth has a card emblazoned with the code, a pixelated black-and-white square. Customers simply scan it with their phone camera to open a website for the online menu. Then they can input their credit card information to pay, all without touching a paper menu or interacting with a server.

A scene like this was a rarity 18 months ago, but not anymore. "In 13 years of bar ownership in San Francisco, I've never seen a sea change like this that brought the majority of customers into a new behavior so quickly," said Ben Bleiman, Teeth's owner.

QR codes — essentially a kind of bar code that allows transactions to be touchless — have emerged as a permanent tech fixture from the coronavirus pandemic. Restaurants have adopted them en masse, retailers including CVS and Foot Locker have added them to checkout registers, and marketers have splashed them all over retail packaging, direct mail, billboards and TV advertisements. ... 

QR codes can store digital information such as when, where, and how often a scan occurs. They can also open an app or a Website that then tracks peoples personal information, or requires them to input it .... 

From The New York Times 

View Full Article

AWS Provides Advanced Location Services

Considerable detail here on the services involved.   Makes sense, they are the practitioners now.

Amazon Location Service Generally Available With Routing and Satellite Imagery By Renato Losio    in Infoq

AWS has recently announced the general availability of Amazon Location Service, a managed solution designed to add location functionalities to applications. The service relies on location providers like Esri and HERE and now supports routing and satellite imagery capabilities.

Amazon Location Service includes five main features for location-based developments: maps, to visualize location information, places, to support geocoding and reverse geocoding capabilities, routes, trackers and geofences. Among the most common use cases, Location Service is designed for building delivery applications, asset tracking and geomarketing .... " 

A Camera that Knows Where it is

Think of a camera as a means of adding information to a database about space.

Bristol Researchers' Camera Knows Exactly Where It Is

University of Bristol News (U.K.)

A camera developed by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Bristol can construct a pictorial map to ascertain its current location. The camera employs a processing-on-sensor Pixel Processor Array (PPA) that can recognize objects at thousands of frames per second, to generate and use maps at the time of image capture, in conjunction with an on-board mapping algorithm. When presented with a new image, the algorithm determines whether it is sufficiently different to previously observed images, and stores or discards data based on that assessment. As the PPA device is moved around by a person or robot, for example, it compiles a visual catalog of views that can be used to match any new image in localization mode. The PPA does not send out images, which boosts the system's energy efficiency and privacy. ... ' 

AWS Location Services

Notified of this capability.

AWS announces general availability of Amazon Location Services

By Sage Lazzaro   @SageLazzaro  in Venturebeat

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced the general availability of Amazon Location Service, a new offering that makes it easier for enterprises to add location functionality to their applications.

With the service, Amazon says customers can integrate location functionalities in a simpler, more cost-effective way, without compromising on user privacy or security. The data, from location-based service (LBS) providers Esri and HERE Technologies, can provide maps, points of interest, route planning, geocoding, geofencing, and asset tracking.

The news comes just days after the company announced the general availability of Redshift ML, which lets customers use SQL to query and combine structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes  ... " 

Limiting Location Data Exposure

Basic cautions/mitigations on releasing location data.  From the NSA, a considerable recent update.  Instructive, but not meant to prevent data loss.   Via Schneier

Limiting Location Data Exposure
Mobile devices store and share device geolocation data by design. This data is essential to device communications and provides features—such as mapping applications—that users consider indispensable. Mobile devices determine location through any combination of Global Positioning System (GPS) and wireless signals (e.g., cellular, wireless (Wi-Fi®1), or Bluetooth®2(BT)). Location data can be extremely valuable and must be protected. It can reveal details about the number of users in a location, user and supply movements, daily routines (user and organizational), and can expose otherwise unknown associations between users and locations.

Mitigations reduce, but do not eliminate, location tracking risks in mobile devices. Most users rely on features disabled by such mitigations, making such safeguards impractical. Users should be aware of these risks and take action based on their specific situation and risk tolerance. When location exposure could be detrimental to a mission, users should prioritize mission risk and apply location tracking mitigations to the greatest extent possible. While the guidance in this document may be useful to a wide range of users, it is intended primarily for NSS/DoD system users. 

Mobile devices expose location data
Using a mobile device—even powering it on—exposes location data. Mobile devices inherently trust cellular networks and providers, and the cellular provider receives real-time location information for a mobile device every time it connects to the network. This means a provider can track users across a wide area. In some scenarios, such as 911 calls, this capability saves lives, whereas for personnel with location sensitivities, it may incur risks. If an adversary can influence or control the provider in some way, this location data may be compromised. Public news articles have reported that providers have been known to sell data, including near-real time location data, to third-parties [1].  ... "

Steve Gibson on Why Contract Tracing Won't Work

I have inserted links below to this analysis of Apple/Google attempts at generalized software based tracking.   

See also related Bruce Schneier article:   https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-19_.html   With considerable and often thoughtful discussion.

Steve Gibson  in Podcast:
Contact Tracing Apps R.I.P.    https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/768

https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-768-Notes.pdf

Software-based Contact Tracing is Doomed

Apple and Google will not Allow Use of Location Tracking in Tracing System.

Does seem to be a minimal embedded restriction to Location Privacy.

Apple, Google Ban Use of Location Tracking in Contact Tracing Apps
By Reuters
May 12, 2020

Can contact tracing apps be trusted? 
Apple and Google will not allow the use of location tracking in apps using their new contact tracing system.

Apple and Google said they would not allow the use of location tracking in apps using their new contact tracing system to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The system would be used by public health authorities to notify people who have been in contact with others who have tested positive for COVID-19.

The primary goal of the system, according to the companies, is privacy, and preventing governments from using the system to compile data on citizens.

The system uses Bluetooth signals from phones to detect encounters and does not use or store GPS location data.

The companies also will permit just one app per country to use the contact system, but they will support countries that opt for a state or regional approach, and said U.S. states will be allowed to use the system. ... "

From Reuters  ... full article at the link.
General overview of method and privacy restrictions.
Technical API Guidelines and Descriptions.

Brain Navigation

Combining visual inputs and motion to better understand the implications of navigation.     Help us predict the implications, e.g the context implications of planning for motion.

How the brain encodes landmarks that help us navigate
Neuroscientists discover how a key brain region combines visual and spatial information to help us find our way.  By Anne Trafton | MIT News Office

Press Inquiries
When we move through the streets of our neighborhood, we often use familiar landmarks to help us navigate. And as we think to ourselves, “OK, now make a left at the coffee shop,” a part of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) lights up.

While many studies have linked this brain region with landmark-based navigation, exactly how it helps us find our way is not well-understood. A new study from MIT neuroscientists now reveals how neurons in the RSC use both visual and spatial information to encode specific landmarks.

“There’s a synthesis of some of these signals — visual inputs and body motion — to represent concepts like landmarks,” says Mark Harnett, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “What we went after in this study is the neuron-level and population-level representation of these different aspects of spatial navigation.”

In a study of mice, the researchers found that this brain region creates a “landmark code” by combining visual information about the surrounding environment with spatial feedback of the mice’s own position along a track. Integrating these two sources of information allowed the mice to learn where to find a reward, based on landmarks that they saw.

“We believe that this code that we found, which is really locked to the landmarks, and also gives the animals a way to discriminate between landmarks, contributes to the animals’ ability to use those landmarks to find rewards,” says Lukas Fischer, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the study. ... "

Google Doing Mobility Reports

More on what Google can track.

Google Is Tracking Whether You're Staying Home

The company released "mobility reports" that show how people are social distancing in your area. By Jason Aten in Inc.

If there has ever been a question about the amount of information Google has about you, let this sink in--the company just released county-level reports about exactly how our travel patterns have changed over the past few weeks. Most of us have some sense of the reality that we're always being tracked, especially when it comes to what we do online, but this data may give some of us pause. ... "

Monitoring Virus Patients by Phone

With an expectation of a certain degree of violation of privacy and the need for regulating that.

Israel Takes Step Toward Monitoring Phones of Virus Patients
Associated Press
By Josef Federman
March 15, 2020

Israel's government has authorized its Shin Bet security agency to use its phone-surveillance system on coronavirus patients in an effort to control the epidemic, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledging that such measures would "entail a certain degree of violation of privacy." Shin Bet would employ mobile-phone tracking technology to more precisely model a patient's movements prior to diagnosis, and identify people who might have been exposed to the virus. In response to privacy concerns, Netanyahu reduced the scope of information to be collected and restricted how many people can view the data, to shield against misuse. Yuval Elovici at Ben-Gurion University's cybersecurity research center suggested privacy issues can be minimized by culling data anonymously. ... " 

Geofencing Warrant Policing

Had not heard the term 'Geofence' in law before, passed this along to lawyers I know to get their opinion on the current uses of this idea.

Google location data led police to investigate an innocent cyclist
The incident shows the very real problems with geofence warrants.
Jon Fingas, @jonfingas   in  Engadget
1h ago  ... ' 

Intel's LIDAR for Inventory Logistics

We spent time experimenting with a means to determining accurate inventory and location accuracy positions in warehouses and on store shelves.    Here a relatively new approach in the space.  Originally noted in AppleNews. 

Intel’s latest RealSense lidar camera is designed for inventory logistics
Brian Heater@bheater in TechCrunch

Intel today introduced the latest addition to its RealSense line. The L515 is roughly the size of a tennis ball, targeted specifically for warehouse logistics — a hugely important and increasingly automated aspect of global trade.

Other potential applications for the new camera include retail, healthcare, 3D scanning and robotics. The little hockey puck is capable of scanning a scene and creating a point cloud with millions of depth points a second, per Intel — a fairly impressive spec, given its size.  .... "