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Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

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Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#61

Post by nielsbot »

ZebusJesus wrote: post #49

Phones haven't always had GPS information and they could still be tracked, if you connect to enough towers they can triangulate your location. Cell towers have been able to do this based on your signal strength for a very long time and you cant turn it off. You don't even have to have a SIM card, if the cell radio is on it pings towers period, this is why a phone even without service can dial 911 and it will work. Th…

The article is not about cell tower triangulation

FTA:

> But this is not the whole truth, because cellular standards have built-in protocols that make your device silently send GNSS (i.e. GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou) location to the carrier.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#62

Post by roywiggins »

winstonwinston wrote: post #59
roywiggins wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phone could literally pop up a consent alert asking whether to respond to a GPS ping request from the carrier. Or just not honor the pings at all unless you dialed 911 within the last hour. This is a specific service inside the phone that looks for messages from the carrier requesting a GPS position, it could just refuse, or lie. It's not the same as cell tower triangulation.

The article does not explain in detail how all this works. But educated guess is that if a baseband SoC provides this information, that's it. The phone operating system (iOS, Android) does not get a chance to decide what to do, since baseband soc is a sort of autonomous computer, it has its own firmware, cpu and ram.

You might not be able to fix this in the OS alone, but phone manufacturers are responsible for the whole phone. The baseband doesn't need to behave that way.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#63

Post by nephihaha »

Plasmoid2000ad wrote: post #11
tekla wrote: post #4

How is this news? Why wouldn't carriers be able to ask your phone about what it thinks its location is?

Why would they? It's basic privacy no? Just because I want to pay money to carrier to provide me with data and phone service, I shouldn't have to give up my location from my device. I expect them to know my approximate location from cell tower data. Generally I'd not expect them actively triangulate my exact location, but I'd realise that's at least possible - but GPS data, wake my phone up, switch on the GPS radio,…

It's all in the small print or acquired by deception.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#64

Post by IshKebab »

AlexanderYamanu wrote: post #41

euhm, well. 112 programmer here. There are multiple levels. Cell tower triangulation come in automatically from providers. But they are only in tower numbers. They might be wrongly entered by engineers, hence the confirming question about where you are. Second is subscription information, as in registered address. Chances are if called from nearby your address, you are at your address. Next is a text to your phone nu…

> This can be turned off, since implementation.

Not by users. The new thing is that Apple allows users to disable this feature. Hopefully they still detect emergency calls on the phone and enable it unconditionally for those.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#66

Post by elnerd »

grepfru_it wrote: post #47
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #40

This community should be talking about meshcore more imho. It's a peer to peer network based on Lora. It really only allows text messaging but with up to 20km hops between peers coverage is surprisingly huge. Incredibly useful if you go hiking with friends (if you get split up you can still stay in touch). See https://eastmesh.au/ and scroll down to the map for the Victoria and now more widely Australia network that'…

Great for small networks. Once bad actors find it, it will be attacked. See gnutella as the case study on unsupervised peer to peer networks

I just read gnutella page on Wikipedia, no mention of bad actors

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#68

Post by Frost1x »

thisislife2 wrote: post #44

From the comments, it appears many are not aware that even the US government buys location data of users from data brokers - How the Federal Government Buys Our Cell Phone Location Data - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government... ... Apparently, US cell phone companies are one of the providers of this data - US cell carriers are selling access to your real-time phone location data - https://news…

We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do. Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.

But we want to support privatization at all cost, even when privatization these days has significant influence on our daily lives, akin to the concerns we had when we placed restrictions on government. Seems like we need to start regulating private actions a bit more, especially when private entities accumulate enough wealth they can act like multi state governments in levels of influence. That’s my opinion, at least.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#69

Post by apparent »

meindnoch wrote: post #45

What if I told you that carriers can also activate your phone's microphone without your knowledge and listen in on your surroundings?

One of the reasons I use iPhones is that Apple controls an integrated hardware/software experience, which makes it less likely that private information is being leaked despite the presence of privacy controls.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#70

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

metaphor wrote: post #52
mcculley wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cell tower triangulation does not provide the same precision as GPS.

What makes you think cell tower triangulation is the only data point being exploited to minimize position error?

I've wondered if they can also find you by what wifi or Bluetooth devices are around. Odds are one or more humans nearby has their GPS on. Your device can snitch on what's around or those other devices snitch on you.
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