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Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

an.dywa.ng

151–160 of 622 posts

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#151

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…

American carriers have a different protocol than the EU. The EU (and probably EU derived networks) uses a """secret""" SMS format that's opt-in, but the 911 system works differently. The 911 feature can be activated fully remotely, the 112 feature is supposed to only activate when dialing an emergency number.

The US one is called E911: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_911

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#152

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'…

Meshcore and -tastic have the huge problem that the encryption keys are bound to the device and not the app.

I agree, there's way too much going on in the firmware, just make a dumb Lora-bluetooth bridge. Hell, just integrate a Lora radio in a phone.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#153
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I take it you never got a mislabeled mp3 of Bill Clinton advertising online poker.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#154
post #68

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 infl…

I agree completely with your first paragraph, but I'm not sure what privatization has to do with it. Also, I agree that more regulation of private parties is needed. Or even better, break up the private companies that are like multi-state governments in terms of power.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#155

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'…

The crypto is bad and the networks are extremely low bandwidth and quite unreliable and are vulnerable to jamming or spam/overload.

I’ve deployed lots of nodes, and the technology reminds me of ipfs: people who don’t use it much vastly oversell its capabilities.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#156
All over southern California and Nevada, facial recognition cameras have been put up aiming all four directions at most surface street intersections.

It’s also illegal to sell new cars without a cell modem in them.

The phones are the least of our worries.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#157

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'…

Reticulum gets around a lot of these problems, as the (better) encryption is app-level (or even more fine-grained.) Its also not tied to lora, so you can interop easily with other transports. I made a websocket transport for it, and there is already TCP and UDP, and a couple non-lora radio transports. I also made a (works on web) js and Arduino client lib, and it has a few native client libs, so it can sort of be used on anything, even over traditional networks, or web clients. Meshcore and meshtastic are way more popular, but reticulum seems so much better, to me, for most things. It can still have overload problems, like any radio network, but no client is required to forward, so you can build a different kind of network ("only forward messages that are for my peeps" and marked correctly.) It also has "it costs compute PoW to send to me" which can greatly cut down on spam.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#158
post #79

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

My provider knows who I call, who I text, which websites I browse, my bank account number, my home address, my rough location, which countries I visited for holiday and through DTMF they can even sense which buttons I press on my handset.

Eh, no? How does your provider know all your bank accounts? If at all, then the one you are using for billing - but the 2FA apps do not expose such data to the provider? The Apps communicate via HTTPS calls in the background?

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#159

"and notify the user when such attempts are made to their device." We aren't going to remove the security state. We should make all attempts to, but it won't happen. What needs to happen is accountability. I should be able to turn off sharing personal information and if someone tries I should be notified and have recourse. This should also be retroactive. If I have turned off sharing and someone finds a technical loo…

This is exactly what GDPR does.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#160

Removing this ability also prevents emergency services from determining device location in case its owner goes missing.

No? If the device is connected to a cell, they can still triangulate it just like normal.

Triangulation does not provide granularity needed for emergency response.

You want EMS looking for a needle in a haystack while you are suffering a heart attack?

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