Clients of the MTS operator get into the society of total surveillance from Tuesday ten rubles per subscriber

The owners of SIM-cards of MTS are well aware of the WWW.MTS.Ru site and its section “ Services ”. The MTS-Search service is dedicated to a separate site WWW.MPoisk.Ru , which has a hyperlink from the services page.

On the MTS Search website , you can read, for example, about the Locator service, the essence of which is this: you can now find out where your friends and relatives are and also see their location on the city map. To prevent this service from tracking people without their consent, it’s arranged like this: first, the monitored subscriber is registered (by sending a special SMS message and receiving a unique code in reply), and then reports this code to the tracking subscriber, thereby allowing him to follow himself. The tracking subscriber enters the code and starts to see the person on the card with this code.

Rather, this service was so arranged.
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Unfortunately, you can read in the news on the website of the M-Search service that from November 10 (that is, on Tuesday next week) a so-called “simplified” order of surveillance is introduced, in which it suffices to specify only the telephone number of the MTS subscriber (and not a secret code received from him on his own!) and pay 10 rubles to see the position of this subscriber both via wap.mpoisk.ru (from a mobile phone) and on the MTS-Search web portal (in the “ My Friends ” section) , and using the Yandex.Maps application on a mobile phone.

The livejournal izmalexey blogger remarked : such a change in the order of surveillance may indicate that MTS is thus preparing to open the way to spying on many of its subscribers, to sell them cheaply. Dear MTS-Search subscribers , you just imagine: next week you will be able to track everything without your knowledge and consent - spouses, beloved, and friends, and enemies, and public services, and private, and journalists, and psychos and so on. And the price you - 10 rubles maximum (and there are wholesale discounts, named in the same news).

In many cities will be directly indicated the number of the house in which you are right now, or the nearest intersection of streets.

This is very similar to the absurd stories from recent spam scam, right? But now it all becomes an unpleasant reality, official news. Undoubtedly, the MTS is only the first and largest swallow; Soon, all other cellular companies may follow it, if the business of trading the location of subscribers is too successful to be abandoned for some moral reasons.

Welcome to cyberpunk dystopia. The M a T rix ha S you.

Postscript the next day.

On November 8, at about noon, the news on the M-Search site was supplemented with the following paragraphs:

In this case, the designated subscriber will receive a notification indicating your telephone number and, if the consent is confirmed, will be added to your list.

If desired, the designated subscriber can cancel the previously issued permissions.

All registration messages in the service to number 6630 are free.

Some commentators, of course, decided that these lines were there from the very beginning, but I did not specifically quote them. In fact, they were still there yesterday (and even on the morning of November 8).

So, our cyberpunk story ended relatively well. Just do not give your cell phones to all those who can send consent to be monitored on your behalf.