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US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

zdnet.com

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Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#581

Post by jusssi »

e_proxus wrote: post #200
matwood wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is once it's at the cell carrier level it doesn't even matter if you use a dumb phone. They know roughly where you are based on tower triangulation.

Not my area of knowledge at all, so perhaps someone who knows radio better could chime in: Would it be possible to fool the triangulation from the device, by arbitrary (or intelligently) delaying the mobile radio signals? Or are they too dependent on timings and such to work?

With highly directional antenna and carefully selecting your position, you could try to have your signal only to be heard by a single cell tower at the time. The network would get your distance from the tower, but with direction info from just one tower would be less accurate.

Expanding this, you could have N directional antennas pointed to N cell towers, and some individual delays on each of those antennas, it might be possible to fool the network triangulation. Such a setup would look highly suspicious if you were carrying it around, and it definitely wouldn't fit in your pocket.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#582

Post by mygo »

lallysingh wrote: post #358
88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you able to send them a copy of their individual location data, or the location data of their staffers/friends/family? That might make for a potent wake up call. Though, you'd want to run that by an attorney first.

Screw that. Put together a consumer stalking website, sell the data directly. Advertise, make tons of money, and let the outrage from that bring light to the entire industry.

To get initial traction, you can even call it “where’s waldo” to get the publicity of a trademark suit. go for broke — you’d be going to jail anyway once any meaningful legislation is put into place

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#583

Post by sp332 »

jakeogh wrote: post #556
sp332 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want every single cell phone call in the world to send out a signal over every single cell tower?

/napkin overestimate using US 6B/calls/day with a nationwide 256B packet each, that's roughly a 100Mbps broadcast channel, which is ~5 digital TV channels, or one geostationary satellite's half-duplex bandwidth if it could see the entire US. As mdhardeman points out, it's easier than that, and there is plenty of room for re-transmission. What is the passive bitrate of a tower->cell connection? LTE/GSM whatever.

With everyone's phones receiving and parsing that, batteries would die very quickly.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#584

Post by alphydan »

wilsonnb wrote: post #392
whatshisface wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it bother you that you're being tracked?

I'm not the person you're asking this question to, but I thought I'd reply anyways. No, it doesn't really bother me. Why would anyone care that I get up around 7AM on weekdays, drive to work around 9, stay there until 5, and then drive home? On weekends they will see me going to Target and the grocery store. Sometimes another store. Sometimes I go to visit my family in another city. I really don't care if people have…

Sorry. In your years of volunteering with the homeless you rubbed shoulders with the wrong people. Our data says you are Islamofilic. Please present yourself at the interrogation booth March 1st 2025. That's why.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#585

Post by wilsonnb »

King-Aaron wrote: post #531
wilsonnb wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the person you're asking this question to, but I thought I'd reply anyways. No, it doesn't really bother me. Why would anyone care that I get up around 7AM on weekdays, drive to work around 9, stay there until 5, and then drive home? On weekends they will see me going to Target and the grocery store. Sometimes another store. Sometimes I go to visit my family in another city. I really don't care if people have…

I wonder how many of the 16-million East Germans had this same utopian outlook on it.. Edit: While things are "good", I'm sure you and a lot of others don't see an issue. But you're giving yourself a lot of rope to be hung on if ever things become hard.

I guess my view of the situation is that the massive collection of data only becomes a problem in situations where we can absolutely not trust our government, and if things get that bad then we have much bigger problems than the government having a lot of data about us. At that point they don't need evidence of wrongdoing to drag people into the street and shoot them, so it doesn't matter to me if they have it.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#586

Post by codedokode »

fixermark wrote: post #268
codedokode wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically either give up your right for privacy or don't use any new technology? That doesn't look practical. A better idea would be to ban cell carriers (and anyone else) from using location data for anything except explicitly permitted by law, like help in emergencies or conducting investigations.

For communications technology: yes, that seems to be the norm. Don't like the rules of the road, don't drive. Don't like that your data goes over a third-party's network to get to its destination, don't put your data on a third-party's network. Bans "by law" only work until the people making the law become people interested in your location and they change the law.

Doctors for example are not allowed to tell everyone about your health problems. I don't see why the same rules cannot work for telecoms.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#587

Post by i_cant_speel »

ZainRiz wrote: post #456
lallysingh wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Screw that. Put together a consumer stalking website, sell the data directly. Advertise, make tons of money, and let the outrage from that bring light to the entire industry.

And then be the only one sent to jail as the scapegoat for the rest

It's not illegal.

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#588

Post by wilsonnb »

alphydan wrote: post #584
wilsonnb wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the person you're asking this question to, but I thought I'd reply anyways. No, it doesn't really bother me. Why would anyone care that I get up around 7AM on weekdays, drive to work around 9, stay there until 5, and then drive home? On weekends they will see me going to Target and the grocery store. Sometimes another store. Sometimes I go to visit my family in another city. I really don't care if people have…

Sorry. In your years of volunteering with the homeless you rubbed shoulders with the wrong people. Our data says you are Islamofilic. Please present yourself at the interrogation booth March 1st 2025. That's why.

At that point, what's to stop them from forcing me to present myself at the interrogation booth anyways? Does it matter if they have data "proving" that I've done something wrong, or if they just make it up?

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#589

Post by gergles »

chatmasta wrote: post #162
random6547545 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's android for the hardware manufacturers and OS crapware getting location data. For iOS, assume every app using your location is selling the data. That means every app using a map or location smoothing SDK (GPS jumps around, there are services to smooth it out), since the map SDK providers (and there's not many) are selling your data even if the app itself isn't. Google, Apple, Microsoft etc are pretty careful for…

Every app that has access to nearby WiFi SSIDs (or even just the one you’re connected to) can also turn this data into location data. In fact I don’t think that is even a gated permission on iOS.

This isn't a user-gated permission but an Apple-gated one. Apps can't retrieve the nearby SSID list unless they have the "Hotspot Helper" entitlement from Apple. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/n...

Re: US cell carriers are selling access to real-time phone location data

#590

Post by d0lph »

ethbro wrote: post #573
King-Aaron wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how colloquial language develops, however.

This is true. But it doesn't make every new development an intelligent or useful one. But then I also just enjoy responding with "Cyber what?" whenever someone uses it as a noun. The correlation between people who are asked and can then provide a relevant noun has not been high.

Seems kinda useful, to group knowledge regarding computers & the internet, and how they impact other industries.
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