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Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

an.dywa.ng

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Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#401

Post by trimethylpurine »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #375
trimethylpurine wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many rulings, just in the last 25 years even, where SCOTUS has reaffirmed that warrantless search is not okay. This one is very much in line with the topic, in fact. Carpenter v. United States (2018) This country has never been what you're saying. We have some over policing happening. That seems to come and go in every country and doesn't say anything by itself about what a county is about, especially wh…

As people are getting shot by ICE today. Today on HN on the front page there was an article about someone being forced to use their biometric security to unlock their phone. And then to say this country has never been what I’m saying is to ignore Jim Crow, sundown towns that were prevalent into the mid 80s, etc.

Democrats (the South) always said that this country was always about slavery. They used that rhetoric to argue FOR slavery for decades after it was abolished. This is all documented in supreme court cases from the 18th century on up through the civil war. Some of the founding fathers argued as attorneys in some of those cases in fact, stating firmly that slavery was always illegal in the United States. Republicans (Lincoln included) pointed to the Constitution as evidence that slavery was always illegal and that the southern states had a limited time to abolish it (that's factually written in the Constitution, a concession made in order to earn their support in the revolution). The disagreement on that is exactly what led to the civil war. The South refused to live up to the Constitution's terms and end slavery, counter to the law.

The Republicans won that war. We live in that country that won. Not the one you're describing. Jim Crow was a Southern state thing. The North never allowed it. We live in the North. The South is gone and it was never part of this country because it violated the laws that would have made it so. They rebelled against anti slavery laws from the beginning and they finally got what they deserved, to be conquered by the United States that we live in today. And then they still argued to keep slavery and the Supreme Court kept slapping it down. Over and over and over.

If you believe that the United States was ever about slavery, then you carry the rhetoric of the very party that created Jim Crow and that supported slavery, and you make them the good guy in the story. You support their version, where it was always legal and they got screwed by the lying North.

The irony... Don't ignore the writings of Washington, Franklin, Hancock, etc. All wrote to say that slavery has no place in this country. And it never did! Their letters are preserved for you to read. They are available online or in one of the museums in DC. Probably the National Archive? Someone can correct me if they know.

Anyway, that some people refuse to follow the law, isn't a reflection of the country as a whole. Similarly, when someone is killed in Norway, I don't jump to conclude that Norwegians are murderers. That wouldn't make any sense.

Did you go to high school in the South somewhere? The revisionist's history of the US seems to stem from that part of the country. I'm just curious if it tracks.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#402

Post by jojobas »

jeroenhd wrote: post #126
IshKebab wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I believe they're talking about this feature ( https://support.google.com/android/answer/9319337?sjid=18079... ). This is a system you can disable as a user, but it's not the on-modem feature discussed in the article.

How would the modem know your coordinates if the OS doesn't provide them?

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#404

Post by jojobas »

jeroenhd wrote: post #131
atheris wrote: post #78

What are the alternative steps that we can take in Android? How to check if it is happening?

I don't believe there is a way to intentionally break this system, nor to detect with 100% certainty that it's happening. You'd need to run an open source baseband modem with settings and logs in all the right places. I don't think those exist. Someone might be able to exploit the Linux kernel running on Qualcomm modems and build a tool for rooted Android phones after reverse engineering the baseband, but I imagine a…

This implies the GPS chip is either integrated with the modem or the actual user-facing OS is passing the location data around - any idea which is it?

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#405

Post by _factor »

Zetaphor wrote: post #366
voidfunc wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idealist views like this get us nowhere either tho. The reality is somewhat more murky. On a long enough time horizon your point makes sense, we might be able to get rid of the security state by slowly chipping away at ig over hundreds or thousands of years. Most of us are going to be dead in about 40 years tho. Security state isn't going anywhere in that timeframe.

I'm curious to hear someone explain why you're being downvoted

Because it is defeatist and helps no one?

“Just give up, it’s a hard problem.”

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#406

Post by burnt-resistor »

While it's a legit metadata privacy vulnerability, it doesn't close a much bigger hole that already exists. (Close it, if you can, of course.)

Almost every carrier can triangulate a handset in an area with multiple towers without help of the handset using relative signal strength to each seen towers and data processing. This is how most police in most jurisdictions are able to find an active handset within ~100m given only a phone number. Don't think carriers in some countries aren't constantly logging that approximate and precise queried location metadata and selling it to data brokers.

The only method to prevent continuously location tracking is to disconnect a handset from the cellular network by attenuating the signal with a blocking bag, antenna disconnection, or real power off. The lack cellular network connectivity may be extremely inconvenient by defeating the purpose of a phone. There are situations where someone doesn't want to power down their phone but does want to be RF clean where a Faraday bag would be a good idea(tm).

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#407

Post by Roark66 »

voidfunc wrote: post #349
_heimdall wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We aren't going to remove the security state We definitely won't get rid of it if we accept failure. I get that it seems extremely unlikely, but there's no use in trying to just mitigate the risk short term. One way or another that power will be abused eventually (if it isn't already).

Idealist views like this get us nowhere either tho. The reality is somewhat more murky. On a long enough time horizon your point makes sense, we might be able to get rid of the security state by slowly chipping away at ig over hundreds or thousands of years. Most of us are going to be dead in about 40 years tho. Security state isn't going anywhere in that timeframe.

>Most of us are going to be dead in about 40 years tho. Security state isn't going anywhere in that timeframe.

How would you know? Think about the collapse of the Soviet Union, or communism in other countries. 2-3 years before it was unthinkable.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#408

Post by Roark66 »

myko wrote: post #291
themaninthedark wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the United States, qualified immunity is a legal principle of federal law that grants government officials performing discretionary (optional) functions immunity from lawsuits for damages unless the plaintiff shows that the official violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known". Under 42 USC § 1983, a plaintiff can sue for damages when state officia…

Nearly impossibly hard to receive justice against government officials due to this standard

This is interesting. In my country (Poland) parliament members have legal, immunity from criminal prosecution and arrest to the point of police not being able to stop them if they drunk drive. There have been some abuses like that.

The law is such that a prosecutor that wants to prosecute them has to ask the parliament. Then there is a vote and the parliament decides if the immunity is taken off.

In a healthy democracy, where there are more than same two parties switching the rule to one or the other it is very likely the current opposition will be the majority next time and they will vote to strip immunity from those that try to use it as a shield for criminals.

I think the price we pay for this (delay in getting justice) is well worth paying so the justice system can't be used as a weapon against political opponents easily.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#409

Post by dotancohen »

lrvick wrote: post #382
hpdigidrifter wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my skepticism but I find it hard to believe you can actually participate in western society without choosing to have a government mandated tracking device? Maybe you live somewhere this is possible but it's definitely not in the developed world

I am a security engineer and I live and work in Silicon Valley with an active social life. None of these things require a phone.

Though I do have a phone, I do not use WhatsApp. I get the same responses you are getting - people absolutely can not believe that we function in society.
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