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McAfee’s tweet gets two key things wrong about this system: There is no such thing as an E911 chip, and the system does not give “them” the information he claims. In fact, the Presidential Alert does not have any way to send data about your phone back to the mobile carrier, though your phone is sending data to mobile carriers all the time for other reasons.
Privacy Issues with Enhanced 911
This isn’t to say that there aren’t serious privacy issues with the E911 system. The E911 system was developed by the FCC in the early 2000’s after concerns that the increased use of cellular telephones would make it harder for emergency responders to locate a person in crisis. With a landline, first responders could simply go to the billing location for the phone, but a mobile caller could be miles from their home, even in another state. The E911 standard requires that a mobile device be able to send its location, with a high degree of accuracy, to emergency responders in response to a 911 call. While this is a good idea in the event of an actual crisis, law enforcement agencies have taken advantage of this technology to locate and track people in real time. EFF has argued that this was not the intended use of this system and that such use requires a warrant.
What’s more, the mobile phone system itself has a huge number of privacy issues: from mobile malware which can control your camera and read encrypted data, to Cell-Site Simulators which can pinpoint a phone’s exact location, to the “Upstream” surveillance program exposed by Edward Snowden, to privacy issues in the SS7 system that connects mobile phone networks to each other. There are myriad privacy issues with mobile devices that we should be deeply concerned about, but the Wireless Emergency Alert system is not one of them.
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