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from the nothing-to-hide,-everything-to-fear dept.
Thailand is considering a proposal to track the location of all SIM cards acquired by foreigners, be they tourists or resident aliens.
The plan's been floated as a way to assist law enforcement agencies combat trans-national crime. Thailand borders Cambodia, Laos and Burma, three nations that have reasonably porous borders, seldom score well on measures of incorruptibility or governance and have form as participants in heroin supply chains.
[...] The good news is that if your phone roams, you'll be exempt. And with roaming plans now catering to travellers there's a good chance you can bring your phone to Phuket without taking a bath on roaming charges.
Resident aliens will be moved to the trackable SIMs. Many such folk move to Thailand to invest or bring expertise to the nation and are unlikely to be happy that their every move is observed. One small upside is that the nation's telecoms regulators aren't entirely sure how to make the tracking work, with cell connection data and GPS both under consideration.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday August 11 2016, @05:07PM
Phone companies can always triangulate you to within a few hundred metres. That power information is required for the network to function.
All phones now have GPS, which can usually be disabled to save power (but auto-enables when calling emergency numbers in many cases). But my phone's GPS thinks I haven't moved 5 metres in the last 9 months (there's an app for that).
If you don't wear a red shirt, you shouldn't have to worry about the Thai government flooding its databases with irrelevant info about you. I you like red shirts, take a walk without your phone already, because that new rule change nothing.
Do you hide your face when you walk around London, too?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 11 2016, @07:14PM
Correction:They can triangulate the phone to that accuracy (and also, that's not true everywhere; it depends in the size of the cell). There's no way they can identify through triangulation who is currently carrying the phone.
Ah, so I guess I don't have a phone. I learned something new today. ;-)
Hint: Not every phone is a smartphone.
Did you actually read my post? It doesn't seem so, as otherwise you would have recognized that this question is completely irrelevant for it. To quote the very beginning of my post:
I was talking about the ineffectiveness of those measures.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.