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Mobile carriers can get your GPS location (an.dywa.ng)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 41 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Carriers are laughing in cellular triangulation

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    we're safe from that particular method here in the boonies. we're lucky to even have one tower from any provider within range anywhere around here.

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  • [–] 16 points 9 months ago

    Not with a bit of data processing. With one tower they can figure out how far away you are. They can track that over time and cross reference that with road layouts when you are moving at highway speeds. Knowing the signal will appear to slow down when you are moving parallel to the cell tower and faster when you are travelling towards or away. Modern antenna designs are also reasonably directional with a tower having banks that point out to cover different quadrants. They know what bank of antennas is facing you.

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    • [–] 36 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    mobile carriers don't need GPS to get your location.

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    • [–] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Apple made a good step in iOS 26.3 to limit at least one vector of mass surveillance, enabled by having full control of the modem silicon and firmware. They must now allow users to disable GNSS location responses to mobile carriers, and notify the user when such attempts are made to their device.

    It seems like the vendor can disable this leak. If we ever get a well-rounded linux OS phone, I imagine this will be moot for those on that platform.

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    • 5 comments in c/privacy@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 7 points 9 months ago* (4 children)

    This does between fuck and all 🤦

    Do you think they can't triangulate you with their cell tower info, especially with the tiny 5G cells?

    Every cell registration that occurs provides that much more triangulation data.

    Now with decades of data from towers, phones and actual GPS data the accuracy is equivalent to GPS.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    The article mentions that.

    But IMO, it's kind of insane that the protocol also kind of forces your phone to send GPS coordinates over... Like.... How the Frick is that necessary and justified at all and became part of the protocol?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    I’ll take it as a win - letting a user decide not to give exact gps coordinates to the tower but forcing them to use the less accurate, more “difficult” triangulation.

    Obviously theres only so much you can do, the fundamental nature of cell phones means your provider knows your location. But that doesn’t mean we need to make it easy and exact

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