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Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

an.dywa.ng

461–470 of 622 posts

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Norms describe averages, I do not necessarily have to follow them as an individual. Eating meat is a social norm, yet in my social group there is far-than average vegetarians and vegans. This is fine, and I don't see a need to change. I as an individual can decide with what other individuals I want to surround myself. And I chose not to surround myself with people that are always late and unreliable.

Norms are not an average. Let us use Constructivism. Countries do not drop nukes on each other. However, if one starts, everyone will follow. Or you may have an arms race situation, one country gets colonies and unless you want to be dominated by other countries, they also get colonies. No phone number? Spend more time getting services. Unable to get services from some companies. Miscommunication/frustration. Less co…

"Getting what you want" is not an attainable life goal for me. People who do that above all else, are willing to throw away with their values whenever it benefits them. So you end up not having or at least living by your values. Unless your value is you above everyone else - Exactly the people I avoid. And why would you want to surround yourself with people that only do what benefits THEM?

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this should be happening without the user's knowledge and consent. Swap out your phone carrier for Facebook and it should be plainly obvious why the current state of affairs is undesirable.

You know about it because your regulatory body requires the system exist.

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Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (L…

The constitution literally said that slaves were counted as 3/5th of a person - the actual founding documents. How can you say this country wasn’t about slavery from the beginning?

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#464
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…

Oh! So IIRC it used to be that the modem could only get a rough estimate of your location and typically Apple/Google's location infra(which combined wifi/blue and lately satellite position based shadow mapping) to determine a precise location. And law enforcement got precise info from _that_ infra(E911 requirements for every device).

Clearly they don't need that now because 5g cell towers have gotten precise enough? Also, if that's true then 5g being that precise might still not apply to urban dense areas, where more postprocessing is required to get better location accuracy...

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

59% say ICE is too aggressive - meaning that 41% approve

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-59-voters-say...

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#466

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…

But for federal officials, individuals don’t have standing right?

Individuals can have standing, but they have to be directly harmed first. You don't have standing just because the law "SilverElfin loses all his constitutional rights and can be arrested for nothing" gets passed. You do have standing once you've been arrested.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#467

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 es…

My knowledge on this is the tower should be able to optimise beams without location information. Channel information can be relayed back to the tower for beam optimisation. The tower needs to know the signal path characteristics but not explicitly the location. Not disputing that location data is used for beam optimisation just that I dont believe it is required.

Exactly, the channel information is all that’s required but you can quite easily get the location information from that, which makes it easier to add additional features from a system point of view.

If I recall correctly, the tower will report channel information to the higher up controller system which will then decide which next tower should be notified of a phone that’s entering its range.

So while explicit positioning isn’t required when dealing with one tower, the system overall does need to determine a users position and velocity to handle tower to tower transfers.

In other words my opinion is that the difference between a towers channel information and a users position is almost one and the same. It’s a handful of math equations away.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For consequences, we need to do away with the notion of qualified immunity. Why should police officers, politicians, agents of the government have any immunity for their actions? They should carry personal liability for breaking the law and violating others’ rights. Otherwise, there is no reason they’ll change. Right now, at best you’ll sue the government and get some money, but all you’re doing is punishing other ta…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really want to get into these Lora based mesh tools but the range in my experience is terrible. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, maybe it's a lack of nodes in my area. I just tested the other day. I'm in the midwest US so it's winter, no leaves. I managed to get about a quarter mile before my two portable nodes couldn't talk to each other. T-Echo with muziworks whip antenna. Without a bunch of solidly placed, high…

Height is might. I couldn't get ANYTHING on my first/test ESP32 (Heltec v2). Anything. I didn't see any packets. Then I finally heard one station later when I held it high on the upper floor. The I hanged it at the top of my roof and I currently have almost 130 repeaters and room servers. In your scenario a couple of 5W handhelds woukd work better. But I agree the usabity is very limited. This is why I think of hangi…

> In your scenario a couple of 5W handhelds woukd work better.

Exactly, in nearly every “off-grid”/no cell service scenario where I’ve needed comms, the GMRS radios > Lora.

Its an interesting idea but I can’t go site prep 100s of miles of snowmobile trail before I go just to be able to send a text to someone a mile away.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#470
post #219

They don't need to get your GPS location. With 4G and 5G the timing and clock precision at the basestations is enough to multi-laterate you down to about 50m (prior 3G/2G stuff was more like 100-200 meters). They are required by US law to store this multi-laterated position data track (updated every time your phone announces itself to basestations) for 2 years. But most telcos store it for more like 5+ years because…

What law requires carriers to keep Cell Site Location Information for 2 years?

I've been repeating this ("a law") since the Snowden leaks days. I was so sure. But I tried to look up my reference for it (it was Wired) and I'm just not finding it and indeed I'm finding government memos (https://web.archive.org/web/20160112232215if_/http://www.wir...) that show it isn't true.

I'm sorry. It is not a law. I am wrong. Thank you for the correction and preventing me from continuing to repeat this embarrassing falsehood.

That said, they do still collect and use this data and turning off GPS doesn't do anything.

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