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Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

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Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#481

Post by rr808 »

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…

Did he connect to your wifi? That would give the exact property to go to instead of via gps.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#482

Post by nashashmi »

rr808 wrote: post #481
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…

Did he connect to your wifi? That would give the exact property to go to instead of via gps.

But the pinging of the phone would not share ip address

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#483

Post by jeroenhd »

stavros wrote: post #270
jeroenhd wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait wait, so if I know the "secret" SMS format I can text someone's phone and get their coordinates back?

I say """secret""" because the spec says that the format should not be published so people can't try to mess with the format, but the first link on Google shows the exact format.

The spec says:

> The AML SMS should not be seen by the caller and therefore should not appear in the SMS "sentbox" of the smartphone. This is to avoid any customer confusion and to avoid making the format of the message widely known. In addition, there is also a potential privacy concern in storing the location of an emergency call from the handset, which could be seen by others.

The AML SMS gets triggered by software on your smartphone when you dial an emergency number. You cannot use it to obtain someone else's location.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#484

Post by jeroenhd »

gruez wrote: post #185
jeroenhd wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 911 feature can be activated fully remotely Source? Even if the phone isn't actively doing a 911 call?

Wikipedia links https://propertyofthepeople.org/document-detail/?doc-id=2108... as proof that the E911 feature is used by the FBI to track phones.

Unfortunately, definitive capabilities and constraints of this kind of cellular technology is hard to come by.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#486

Post by iam-TJ »

ItsBob wrote: post #472
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.

I can tell you with almost 100% certainty: no banks in the UK use any 2FA other than SMS-based. I spent December last year looking for a new bank to move to. One of my criteria (not the most important but it was on the list) was better-than-SMS 2FA. No one offers it. There may be some niche, loosely-based finance org that does but none of the banks or Building Societies do. So, unfortunately, you need it in the UK.

Barclays, with standard current accounts, provides several methods none of which are SMS. There's a separate pin-code device (called Pinsentry) that does TOTP and challenge-response, or passcodes for both telephone and Internet banking.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#488

Post by naikrovek »

itissid wrote: post #464
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…

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?…

5G isn’t inherently any more precise, but because of the higher frequency used in 5G, the radio signals are blocked by obstructions much more easily, so there must be many more 5G radios per unit area to provide coverage. And one feature of having many more base stations around is that triangulation of specific phone is much more accurate and precise because of how close the 5G base stations are to all 5G phones.

5G infrastructure isn’t limited to tall easily visible radio towers like 4G and before; 5G transmitters are small and relatively inexpensive, making them very common. My employer has a private 5G infrastructure, and we are not related to telecommunications in any way.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#489

Post by pclmulqdq »

gregoryw3 wrote: post #449

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…

Information about received power and SNR is relayed over the 5G data link to and from the tower, and beamforming happens that way. As a result, the tower doesn't need to know where you are at all. In fact, with higher frequencies, you often get weird bouncy paths for 5G radio signals so the "beam" that gets formed can be a rather odd shape while being optimal.

Re: Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

#490

Post by NSUserDefaults »

Of course. I was just calling the police on my drive home to report some junk on the road and the operator asked me quite directly “is it on the junction you just passed?”. I didn’t mind actually, saved me some explaining. And if I ever call emergency, I can be pretty sure they will find me.
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