Note from LifeSiteNews president Steve Jalsevac: This is an important article indicating what everyone should understand about 5G which is being rapidly implemented across North America and Europe. Most 5G phones allow (for now) for the user to turn off 5G and instead select, under cellular options, LTE, as the far safer cellular service. We strongly urge that you select that instead of 5G. There are many other issues related to 5G including significant health issues related to the more powerful microwave emissions to and from 5G-enabled smart phones.
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(Reclaim The Net) — 5G networks, that are either already introduced or are about to be implemented in many countries, although representing a large step forward, technologically speaking, come burdened with a number of problems and controversies.
5G is necessary to create “connected smart cities” – an idea that in and of itself faces criticism and opposition.
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A major controversy is related to the undermining of citizen’s privacy while using devices that connect through the new generation network. A specific concern is collection of location data. Not that the existing types of cellular networks don’t already represent a privacy nightmare in terms of location tracking, and potential for mass surveillance stemming from it.
But 5G’s capabilities are on another level, in that people’s location is pinpointed with far greater accuracy than is the case with 4G networks. This is the result of the design of 5G towers, which are significantly smaller and much more numerous.
In contrast to the familiar sight of a 4G tower that covers a large area with a single unit (up to a mile in radius), 5G towers are small – effectively just antennas.
And in places where the new generation network is deployed, they are everywhere, covering a much smaller area. That means outside and inside structures: on top of buildings, street poles, in public spaces like shopping malls, hotels, offices, etc.
And as people move, their location is detected every time their device connects to one such tower. With 4G, that meant once inside the range of about a mile. But with 5G, and thanks to several dozen antennas that replace a single 4G tower, people’s location is tracked from one to the next – it could literally mean from one street corner, or building, to another.
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That will give a pretty clear and precise picture of somebody’s movement to anybody with access to this data – and that is anyone who can get an ISP’s cell tower data, with the tracking performed in real time.
Government agencies aside – if the mobile operator you’re using is selling data to brokers, who then sell it to advertisers, the current sorry state of affairs when it comes to privacy and avoiding tracking, profiling, and targeted advertising will worsen many times over.
Other than being a “data collecting machine on steroids,” 5G is all about greater and easier connectivity, and that means many more devices, specifically IoT ones – that can be found both in homes and in businesses. IoT devices (Internet of Things devices) are already a security nightmare, entailing high risks of endangering personal data, and 5G compounds that problem by greatly increasing their number.
Security researchers see other potential issues that emerge from a network as complex as this, making it more vulnerable to bad actors.
And as the U.S. is rolling out its 5G network this year, there is also the question of where the hardware and software comes from, and how reliable it is, including in terms of the supply chain. If recent major global crises have taught us anything, it’s that the outsourcing of critical manufacturing to only a handful of places in the world is a bad idea.
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Then there’s the issue of trust and geopolitics, because China happens to be the leading nation in developing and supplying 5G tech to countries around the globe.
When it comes to purely technical security concerns, observers say that they can be addressed, though not in any known bulletproof way, at least at this time; as for avoiding highly precise location tracking, the only thing to do to avoid it is not to use 5G.
So what’s good about 5G, and how is it being sold – figuratively speaking?
It is linked to the concept of “the Fourth Industrial Revolution” and advertised in a way enticing people – and countries – to switch to it for trivial reasons: orders of magnitude faster network speeds, all the way to massive job creation and boosting industries linked to areas like medicine and defense, to the tune of trillions of dollars more going to economies around the world.
But while most of this (latency and speed excluded) represents merely forecasts and promises at this point, the privacy and security concerns are very real.
Reprinted with permission from Reclaim The Net.