Tai Lam on a Bike

I've sat in enough public meetings for municipal projects to know that there aren't enough literal sensors (yet) to differentiate between walkers, bikers, and motor vehicle drivers. However, a heuristic “hack” around this limitation is to use cell phone location data.

Apparently, it's a common practice for traffic studies to use cell phone location data to estimate the number of walkers, bikers, and drivers. This is just one method used by local transportation planners.

Your cell phone's location is being tracked all the time by the SIM card-based technology in it (or the eSIM equivalent, if you've been bamboozled by the iPhone 14 or newer iPhones that only use eSIM).

I remember an excerpt from The Daily Show With Trevor Noah in February 2020 about how a German artist pulled 99 smartphones in a wagon (with active cellular service, and presumably signed into a Google account) to create a fake traffic jam outside the German Google headquarters.

(Noah's comedic pretext for entering this line of thought was that there are traffic jams everywhere else now — as in, away from major roadways — due to the Waze app. Ironically, Google also owns Waze, so it's not like one can really escape car traffic in this regard.)

What I described above is what came to mind when I saw this video/article from CBS Boston, which mentions that Boston has the eighth worse traffic delays in the world. This news segment covers how Boston is 1 of 2 cities in the U.S. currently participating in the AI-based Project Green Light program from Google; which will manage traffic lights at intersections (as of August 9, 2024). (The other city at this time is Seattle, which is a bit obvious, as this is the largest international city closest to Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, WA.)

Meanwhile, all I have on my mind is a linear combination of: Skynet taking over the world in the Terminator films; AM from the 1995 video game adaptation of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream (also where Russia and China have their own supercomputers — and these two other countries also pose critical cybersecurity threats IRL, as of August 2024); and how players can create traffic jams via their smartphones to stop pursuers while driving in the Watch Dogs video game series.

Though to be honest, the last Watch Dogs reference is probably the idea that's most likely to come true IRL, at least in the short-term future.

Also, this traffic sounds a bit of greenwashing, as indicated in The Hated One's videos on water depletion from December 2021 regarding data centers in general requiring lots of water for cooling, and in April 2024 regarding AI data centers specifically.

Conclusion

The TV show Mr. Robot was right, leave your cell phone at home (i.e., still keep it turned on, but not with you when doing a surveillance detection route).

Your cell phone carrier will definitely sell cell phone location data to make a profit off from you, and this isn't even due to any legitimate law enforcement request. (Sorry, FISA court requests don't count, at least to the EFF.) Your cell phone location data points are being sold to mapping services, bounty hunters, and probably some other unscrupulous entities. (The NSA doesn't even need to make its first-party interception set ups anymore; instead, it simply buys internet data as a downstream technique in line with “harvest now, decrypt later”.)

Though to be fair, you as the cell phone network user likely allowed this to happen legally, it's probably hidden somewhere in your carrier's terms of service and/or privacy policy, which you signed when you signed up for your cell phone plan.