Phone Monitoring

News that technological monitoring of mobile electronic devices could have a role to play in beating Covid-19 will raise a predictable outcry from the freedom warriors.  How dare the authorities use our data to determine who is infected, where we travel, and whom we may have met?  Never mind drones monitoring your walk in the Dales, your phone may soon start to bleep to warn you that you are too close to some oncoming ramblers.  It all sounds very big brother but, in the context of other extraordinary measures, it seems a very small privacy price to pay if we are to get back to work as soon as possible.

Although there could be some regulatory oversight over how your phone data was processed and used, it could be useful to remind ourselves that criminals in cyberspace are under no such inhibitions.  Indeed, as our use of the internet explodes because of the recent physical confinement, there will be rich pickings for people with bad intentions.  Now I stress that I am not a cyber expert - everything that follows is my opinion.

One of the easiest ways to hack your mobile phone is to set a trap on a public Wi-Fi network.  A resourceful rogue could set up a “free” Wi-Fi hotspot that appears just like something that might be offered by a hotel or supermarket.  Except it is not what it appears and clicking on the link to sign in could open your phone to all sorts of trouble.  Of course the password you used to log on was unique wasn’t it so there is no possibility of a thief using the same password to open another of your sites?  And its no good saying that I never do anything of security significance, like banking, on an open Wi-Fi network because once they are in your phone they can find pretty much everything.  Even if the hotspot itself is not fake, there is no guarantee that bad people could intercept your activity.  I am very grateful for the timely reminder from Jennifer Arcuri, writing in Standpoint, who says, “with free Wi-Fi we have no idea who else is on that network or what they are doing with the information we exchange over it.  We do not even know if the owner of the free Wi-Fi is really who we think it is.”

It is very tempting, if your phone contract places a limit on the ration of mobile data each month, to use so called free Wi-Fi networks but we should be very careful.  I looked at my phone this morning and found that, historically, it had remembered 149 wi fi sites that I had previously used (phones have long memories).  Most of these were legitimate like LNER or Cross Country but dozens could have been anything.  So and so’s café free Wi-Fi, in retrospect, looks potentially suspicious.  So, I told my phone to “forget” most of the site apart from my home wif and a couple about which I could be certain.  I ticked the box which prevents my phone from logging in automatically to any Wi-Fi it might encounter in future.

So after half an hours housekeeping this morning I have formed a new security resolution and to be very careful where I log in in future and make life as hard as possible for cyber criminals.  Meantime, big brother is welcome to my movement data if it helps the current fight.