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Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

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Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#441

Post by GTP »

wongarsu wrote: post #440
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

Phones are required, insering a SIM isn't. Your work and home probably have wifi, and services meant to be used on the go are commonly built with offline use in mind. Especially those you actually need in society A burner phone left at home just for the ability to receive SMS would be helpful for account registrations though

> services meant to be used on the go are commonly built with offline use in mind.

I'm not sure about this. With everyone moving to the cloud and web applications, this seems to not have been the case for a while to me. There surely are what are now called "local-first" alternatives to the main services (in the past those would just be called desktop applications), but if someone is using Office 365, does it have an offline mode? (Sincerely asking since I never tried this, plus, you should still get to load the web application before losing connection, right?)

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#442

Post by donatj »

My friend was going through a pretty massive depression after his mom passed. He'd been with my wife and I at our house for a number of hours talking through it, and apparently not texting his sisters back. They called in a welfare check.

We live in a reasonably dense suburb. Police showed up at our front door and asked to speak with him. They just wanted to make sure he was doing OK. He asked them "how did you find me?" and their response was just "we pinged your phone".

Watching my security camera, they did not stop at any of my neighbors houses first. It was very direct to my front door. This leads me to believe whatever sort of coordinates they had were pretty spot on. His car was parked well down the block and not in front of our house so that was no give away.

This was five years ago and always struck me as a "Huh"

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#444

Post by orphea »

trympet wrote: post #432
lrvick wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I turned off all cell carrier tracking 5 years ago. 100% of it. By canceling my cell phone subscription. I know I know, I must be amish, I have heard it all. But I run two tech companies, travel, have a family, and do most of the things most around here probably do other than doom scrolling. So much more time in my own head to think.

How do you work on the go? I use personal hotspot quite often. Not only when on the go, but if there is unstable WiFi. It’s saved me on multiple occasions - both for live-site incidents and for random meetings.

It really depends on who you work as and what your working conditions are. For example, if I had some non-management position at a company that insists on working from the office, I would make sure that I'm NOT available outside my designated work place.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#445

Post by Lapsa »

donatj wrote: post #442

My friend was going through a pretty massive depression after his mom passed. He'd been with my wife and I at our house for a number of hours talking through it, and apparently not texting his sisters back. They called in a welfare check. We live in a reasonably dense suburb. Police showed up at our front door and asked to speak with him. They just wanted to make sure he was doing OK. He asked them "how did you find…

[flagged]

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#446

Post by littlecranky67 »

ISL wrote: post #393
lrvick wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All 2FA options that require a phone like TOTP can be done just as easily on a laptop with a yubikey or nitrokey. I have several business and personal bank accounts with two major banks. No Android or iOS needed. Sure they push you hard to use them, but just say it is against your unspecified religion. They cannot make you use Android or iOS.

And your medical provider who will only allow you to see your online medical records after an SMS 2FA challenge?

(not op). I use a dumb feature phones that can receive SMS for far less than 40€ (even cheaper, but I like the music player and some other things like bluetooh for headphones). I have a "twin SIM", i.e. my mobile carier gives me a SIM with the same phone number and if somebody calls me, both phones (smartphone and feature phone) ring. SMS can only be received at one number, but you can switch the SIM for SMS reception using the carrier website. Since I only take the feature phone when I leave home (to enjoy outside time without distractions) I usually don't turn it on.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#447

Post by littlecranky67 »

lazide wrote: post #439
jll29 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you agree to meet someone somewhere at some time, all further communication is redundant (I expect you to be reasonably punctual and I don't need your SMS updates "Hi, leaving the house now." followed by "hi, I'm running 5 min late", I will wait, and if you are not coming, you can call me to apologize if you care one bit). For people who don't know their way, you can use in-car navigation systems rather than sma…

Ah, so I’m guessing 40+ and with a very select group of friends with a long term history. While I agree, that isn’t something 99.9% of the population is going to do successfully.

99.9%? I am old enough to remember time before mobile phones, and being at a place at a prearranged time is possible. Also, if you are late, you can actually do a phone call to inform the other party - all you need is a feature phone, not smart phone.

I personally respect other peoples time and I expect the same for me. That is, I have cut out people from my life in the past that repeatedly would text "hey I'm 20mins late" 2mins before the agreed time. That is still disrespectful with my time, because now I know you are late, but still lost those 20mins. Some people don't consider that rude and for some reason do not see that this would not work if everybody does it. Needless to say, my friends know that I value reliability, and most of them do. People that don't respect that don't need to be in my social group, or at least I don't make plans with them.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#448

Post by everdrive »

I still use an old fashioned external GPS model for this exact reason. The kind you had in the 2000s and 2010s made by Garmin. It's significantly more private, and however imperfect the UI, a UX team has never ruined the UI every 6 months to justify their existence. Since it's not on the internet, it doesn't matter if if it's insecure.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#449

Post by gregoryw3 »

I’m not super sure about the specifics but having taken a 5G class, the professor made it quite clear that due to the latency and bandwidth requirements of 5G, precise tracking is required to allow towers to correctly do beam forming.

If anyone wants to look at the future of 5G (well ORAN) here it is: https://gitlab.eurecom.fr/oai/openairinterface5g

When talking about the 5G system, cell towers can request a users estimated velocity which when combined with the towers own location combined with the physical radio (that is communicating with the phone (UE)) you can get a pretty good position estimation.

What is new is that network providers are trying to sell this tower/5G data to other companies.

I could be wrong but from my understanding 5G has always required precise tracking of every device connected.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#450

Post by _heimdall »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #371
_heimdall wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What poll have you seen that asks people to approve of everything any president does? I live in a very red part of the country, and in a very red, rural area that voted ~90% for Trump. I don't know anyone that is okay with everything he has done. Some take issue with Venezuela, some with the handling of the Epstein files or the federal budget. Some don't like sabre rattling over Greenland. Most people I know that do…

Trump’s approval rating is still around 40% https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker

> 40% of the people still approve of everything Trump is doing.

Someone saying to a pollster that they approve of Trump is very different from them saying they approve of everything he is doing.

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