Math for Security by Daniel Reilly

Author:Daniel Reilly
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781718502574
Published: 2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Ethics of Tracking Devices and People

In some ways, criminals have it easy. A criminal doesn’t have to consider the ethical or moral implications of their actions. Whether they’re exposing their target to additional risk is usually not high on their list of concerns. White hats, on the other hand, have ethical, and oftentimes legal, barriers to consider when obtaining or using location information. In the past, I’ve received records similar to the data for this project from company-owned devices via remote administration tools after an employee’s laptop or cell phone went missing. However, even this seemingly benevolent use is an ethical gray area. Here in the US there isn’t a clear line on an employee’s right to privacy.4 It’s easy to say, “If a company owns a system they have the right to track and monitor it,” but what about people who carry their work systems with them during off-hours (something I regularly do myself)? Several companies even require their managers to keep work phones on them during their downtime—even on vacation. There’s nothing technical to block these companies from tracking their employees during their private time, and the laws are murky and vague, so it becomes purely a question of ethics. When dealing with corporate entities, being forced to trust their ethical behavior scares a lot of people!

Understanding how this technology works, and how to apply it ethically to improve security without hurting privacy, falls to us as researchers and analysts. After reading this chapter, take some time to look up the relevant laws for your area and, perhaps even more importantly, think about what you believe are appropriate and inappropriate uses for this technology.5

For our project, I collected the data on myself using an Android tablet. As the data subject, I was aware of the data collection and gave myself, as the author, permission to use the data in the limited scope of writing this material. The key point here is that the data subject (me) was informed and gave consent. Getting informed consent to perform your analysis can prevent a lot of ethical risk before you even begin. If you apply this type of tracking technology outside the scope of informed consent (such as law enforcement or military applications), you must decide for yourself what ethical doctrine applies.

Now that we’ve discussed the ethics of device tracking in general, and more specifically concerning the various potential applications of our project, we can get into the meat of the problem. In the next section we’ll take a deeper dive into the OpenCellID API, covering the basics of calling the API, the structure of the data returned, and how we can process this information into relevant shape objects.

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