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Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times. This information is known to the phone company, at
by someguydave 9y ago
Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times. This information is known to the phone company, at the very least. The phone company almost always records and retains that information.
Similarly, you cannot communicate to anyone on the internet without using an IP address, which your counterparty must know and nearly always retains.
- geofft 9y agoI think that's what I said - I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me?
- someguydave 9y agoI am skeptical that your phone provider will hold the extensive information they have on your location in confidence. I'm even more skeptical that the recipients of your IP packets will also hold whatever location information they can infer in confidence.
- rhizome 9y agoYour cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times. That's like saying a transistor radio needs to know where broadcast antennas are, which is obviously absurd.
- wvenable 9y agoIt's a cellular telephone -- they need to know all the cell towers near you and direct your phone between them. It's a rough area but my phone provider definitely knows I'm at work right now.
- rhizome 9y agoGP said, "cannot function." How did cellphones work before they came with GPS?
- geofft 9y agoThey registered with the nearest cell towers, and ask them to watch signal strength so they can make handover work. This is coarse location information (since the company that runs the cell towers knows where their own cell towers, and uses your current tower registration to figure out which cell tower to send a call to), and can be made a little more fine-grained if you use signal strength from the various towers and triangulate. This does not involve the Global Positioning System or other satellite-based positioning systems at all. If it does not do this, it is not a cellular phone. There are other types of portable phones that don't work this way, like cordless landline phones (the base doesn't know where it is, just that it's plugged into a phone jack) or satellite phones. But the "cellular" part refers specifically to dividing up the terrain into cells, finding which cell the phone is in, and assigning it to a tower based on that determination. (This is all pretty irrelevant to the point I was making above that cellular network operators can easily choose not to use the location information or signal strength information for anything other than routing calls, and that deciding that they can just use the information however they want would be creepy.)
- rhizome 9y agoAnd that's fine, but none of this addresses the assertion that cellphones can't work without GPS tracking.
- geofft 9y agoNo such assertion was made.
- khedoros1 9y agoGPS tracking is a complete red herring; you're focusing on the wrong thing. No one ever claimed that GPS was necessary. Here's the statement that was made: "Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation)". That "approximation" is: "Which cell towers can hear your phone transmit, and how strong is the signal?" Your cell phone would work just as well as a phone if you disabled the GPS chip, but your location can be estimated by triangulating from signal strength. It's not nearly as precise, or as accurate, as a GPS-provided location would be, of course.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoTransistor radios are receivers only. Cell phones are transmitters that move between various fixed receiver cells. At the very least the phone company knows what cell any given phone is currently connected to. In practice they know the locations and signal strengths of all the cells in range of the phone, which allows triangulation to within a few dozen meters, at worst.
- Chaebixi 9y ago> That's like saying a transistor radio needs to know where broadcast antennas are, which is obviously absurd. Cellphones are called cell phones because they divide the world into location-based cells which determine which antenna your phone talks to. At the very least, the telephone company knows which cell you are located in to communicate with you.
- tclancy 9y agoRight, but "to some approximation" is very squishy for the phone company, whereas I got in my car today and the phone told me how long it would take to get to my shrink. It's fairly impressive they could be so tone deaf as to not see why people wouldn't be delighted with this kind of auto-discovery.
- someguydave 9y agoWell, it would certainly limit the uncertainty of your location from "anywhere on the planet" to "within a few hundred/thousand meters of this point"