Discovering where I have been
I use a pre-pay mobile phone.
I generally top up my credit every few months by thirty or fifty yoyos depending on how flush I am at the time. That usually lasts for several months.
I use my phone for several things. I take notes, or check the weather. Occasionally I’ll check the news or use it to fault-find on my home network. The one thing I very rarely use it for is to make a phone call. I receive a lot of calls all right, so it is an invaluable piece of kit. It’s how Herself contacts me at any time of day or night. Our landline has free calls to mobiles so it is cost-neutral.
Last month I topped up my credit by €50 as it said I was running low. Fine. That’ll last a good while.
Wrong!
Over the weekend I got another warning that I was out of credit. After three and a half weeks? I had made two phonecalls in that period and I knew they would cost, but all my other transactions had either been received calls [dozens] and stuff using an Interweb connection. Where the fuck had my €50 gone?
I checked my phone. I had Data Saver on which instructs the phone to only transfer data via the Interwebs. That shouldn’t cost me anything as my Interweb connection is with a different company. I contacted the mobile company. This wasn’t easy as they don’t give out support numbers. I had to use a “chat” yoke. That of course landed me in the surreal wold of chatting to a robot. I eventually [deliberately] confused it enough that it passed me over to a human.
He was a helpful chap. He typed out his name which I noted in case I was playing Scrabble in the future as it was all consonants. Anyways he went through my call history and informed me it was data usage. In spite of my instructions not to use mobile data, something was draining my cash at a hell of a rate.
I found it. I did so by the simple method of limiting my data cap to 1Mb [it had been set to a default of 5Gb]. Almost immediately I got a warning that I had reached my data cap even though I wasn’t running anything. Immediately after I got a message saying a programme wasn’t working properly as it couddn’t connect. It was Google!
Apparently Google has been tracking my phone constantly and sending my location back to HQ. It displayed a map of everywhere I had driven. It listed every place I had been including the coffee shop and the vet. It listed the total time I traveled last month and the total hours spent shopping or in the coffee shop. The fucking thing probably knew what I had bought and what I had chatted about with my mates.
I use a SatNav to tell me where I want to go. That’s fine. I DO NOT NEED a fucking cunting programme to tell me where I have already been…
That’s one little application that has been burned at the stake.
Google are cunts.
Yeah I turned that off too. Scary stuff.
If they want to know where I go, where I shop and whatever else I do they can write to me [via my solicitor]. I will be only too glad to furnish them with redacted details.
This is the future the ‘government or the WEF who controls the government will know your every move.
They have even bragged about it.
Utube ..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-X_jtpcBEc&t=3s
The boundaries of privacy shrink ever further by the day.
Google (cunts that they are) are usually only doing it for commercial purposes, the government (the real cunts) are the ones we should worry about.
Our every move is already tracked via the cell-infrastructure and, when aligned with ANPR data from thousands of covert roadside cameras and the associated vehicle registration system plus the facial-recognition tricks, they can pretty much reconstruct all your actions and movements whenever they want.
Add to that their secret bases (so secret I can show you where one is) that intercept every single communication, voice or data, and analyse it with very smart software to identify any aspects of interest, then nowhere is safe or private from the interfering state.
On balance I prefer Google, at least it’s occasionally useful, unlike those other devious cunts.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the gubmint. Whatever those twats in the Dáil get up to, they are guaranteed to make a royal fuckup of it.
On PAYG too, but I just don’t buy data for my phone. For 1 thing, it doesn’t roll over like the phone so it only lasts a month. And with no data Google is stuffed.
I never bought data so far as I know. I just paid the one sum to keep the phone alive. In theory, if I make no phone calls then my credit should remain the same, though there is a limit of something like eighteen months when it will finally expire.
Turn off mobile data, wifi, bluetooth, gps. Not only will you not get incur data charges but you will be amazed how much longer your battery lasts if you switch off these bits of hardware. My lovely but sadly obsolete Acer Z3 will do 2+ weeks between charges, including a few hours of calls.
Also consider other providers. I’m paying a fiver a month GBP (SIM only, buy my own phone) including lots of call time, unlimited texts and reasonable data. Probably you can get similar deals in Ireland and probably also port your number between providers if you switch.
And, yes – Google are Cunts (and Woke Cunts too).
Soon the WEF who control all government in the West will be forcing people to have only digital money. Then the really got you, if you upset the government they will shut down you access to your money.
Thats what that prat in Canada done with the truck drivers.
I know Bluetooth is a fierce drain on the battery so I lave that switched off. However I have to remember to switch it on if I’m driving anywahere so it can blend with the car. Usually I forget and miss a call or two. GPS is disabled along with data [now every time I switch on the phone it complains about my data limitations]. The nly one that’s left on is Wifi as Daughter uses WhatsApp and it’s free.
Being a ‘proverbial technical knee-high’, I didn’t even know of all this data stuff, so now I’ve got to check the details as you and helpful commenters have noted here!
I seem to get charged quite a lot for texts, but they’re mainly by sending dog pictures to anyone who’s half-interested from our walks, and anyway, I bought £30.00 of PAYG nealy two years ago, and haven’t paid a penny since, so probably I’m not a data subject…
…probably will from now on as I’ll do something stupid like turn the bloody thing on…
I just dicaryd a count on my phone – 117 applications would like to use data over the network. If I let them all loose, God knows what my bills would be [or how quickly I’d use any credit]. Scary?