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>"And they can actually pinpoint on Google Maps exactly where you were standing. Like, he knew where I was standing on the sidewalk, like specifically, based on
by DebtDeflation 6y ago
>"And they can actually pinpoint on Google Maps exactly where you were standing. Like, he knew where I was standing on the sidewalk, like specifically, based on my cell phone ping."
You don't get that level of granularity by merely triangulating cell tower pings. Sounds like they got GPS location data from people's Google accounts.
- emteycz 6y agoYou don't get that level of granularity from a single ping, but you theoretically could from hundreds, the noise will tend to center around the true location. Also consider that more than 3 stations probably were nearby.
- BelenusMordred 6y agoModern mobile networks choose the best 7 for the client but the number of towers within physical range getting pinged is quite substantial. It's an awesome, deep and nuanced topic certainly not suited to a political HN comments section. "Timing Advance" is the probably the jumpoff keyword for anyone interested. Mobile towers also use beam-forming in two directions and have a few other techniques to get better signals, the metadata involved with these things (if kept) essentially drops the error range down to GPS levels if not better.
- ev1 6y ago5G significantly increases granularity by a metric shit ton, and if they were continually pinging in the same area, eventually you end up with roughly one zone.
- tiagod 6y agoWho the hell has a 5G device?
- scsilver 6y agoAlot of people buy new Iphones.
- ev1 6y agoYou don't even need iPhones - most of the cheap prepaid brands that you'd see next to a payday loan shop are offering Samsung's lower grade phones or OnePlus 5G phones for free if you set up autopay (it's locked to that carrier). Of course it comes with even more privacy-violating bloatware than ever, but still - 5G is no longer a rarity or expensive.
- gambiting 6y agoIs this....a serious question? All new iPhones are 5G compatible for the start and they sell millions, and loads of other manufacturers have released 5G compatible phones. In fact I'd risk a guess that if you bought a phone in the last 12 months it's likely to be a 5G compatible phone.
- throwaway09223 6y agoI bought a Pixel4 in March 2020 :(
- mfkp 6y agoAssuming you meant Pixel 4a, that one does not have 5G. The "4a 5G" model does, though, but it came out later in the year.
- throwaway09223 6y agoNo, the regular Pixel4. No 5g.
- tobylane 6y agoI’m guessing people who flew into DC on a weekday are more likely than average to own a decent smartphone. QAnon folk don’t seem to avoid mainstream technology in the quantity HN users do.
- diebeforei485 6y agoCould you share some resources with more information on this- how does it increase granularity?
- nexthash 6y agoHere's Verizon's explainer [1] about how 5G works. Basically, since the frequencies needed to transmit large amounts of data are so high (28 - 39 GHz millimeter wavelength bands), the signal does not reach as far as a 4G tower. Therefore, a higher density of towers is needed (500 feet apart to effectively penetrate buildings [2]), allowing for higher granularity cell-phone triangulation/tracking as a by-product. [1] https://www.verizon.com/about/news/how-far-does-5g-reach https://www.verizon.com/about/news/how-far-does-5g-reach [2] https://www.celltowerleaseexperts.com/cell-tower-lease-news/5g-cell-towers-are-they-safe-who-decides-where-they-go/ https://www.celltowerleaseexperts.com/cell-tower-lease-news/...
- Gibbon1 6y agoWell GPS is 1.2 to 1.5GZ and you can get accuracy to a few meters easily. I have a higher end module that gets down to a meter[1]. Seems obvious that G4 which uses roughly same frequencies but with cell towers vastly closer than a GPS satellite could get 1M. [1] Give it a few minutes and it'll pin point where my desk is inside my office.
- BurningFrog 6y agoGPS does not use triangulation. It does some real dark arts physics wizardry to compute a position. Nothing like that can be done for cell phone signals.
- Gibbon1 6y ago> GPS does not use triangulation. LOL
- sobriquet9 6y agoBoth GPS receivers and cell phone towers use the same basic approach based on the time it takes for the signal to travel between transmitter and receiver. The only substantial difference is that in case of GPS the calculation happens on the receiver side (GPS signals only go in one direction), while cellular service providers calculate time advance on the tower side.
- schoolornot 6y agoAT&T is still installing Carrier IQ on almost all Androids. That application is collecting info like GPS and barometric readings to estimate floor location in a highrise, etc.
- pdoege 6y agoAbsolutely. In addition all carriers use multi-lateration and sectorization to fine tune location. The better the location the more valuable it is for commercial resale and CALEA sales. Notice that all of this is entirely legal, above board, and you agreed to it as part of your service agreement. Source: I worked for AT&T and Carrier IQ
- WarOnPrivacy 6y ago> you agreed to it as part of your service agreement "Agree" implies willful consent and being in harmony with the implied outcome. People accept because they have no meaningfully acceptable choice - which is the exact target that carriers aim for.
- hocuspocus 6y agoThey don't even need Carrier IQ, they can use Minimization of Drive Tests, it's part of 3GPP standards. But even using timing advances, if the cells aren't too big, you get a pretty reasonable accuracy.
- superkuh 6y agoIt's not triangulation, it's multi-lateration and the spatial resolution depends on just how good the basestation clocks are. And they've become very good. Every telco in the USA stores multi-lateration for cell handsets location for 2-5 years by default. They both sell this commercially and provide/sell it to authorities on request. >Multilateration should not be confused with triangulation, which uses distances or absolute measurements of time-of-flight from three or more sites, or with triangulation, which uses a baseline and at least two angles measured e.g. with receiver antenna diversity and phase comparison.
- jessaustin 6y agoIs that first "triangulation" supposed to be "trilateration"?
- Drip33 6y agoI have access to some marketing data and for fun, select * from mobile_location where latitude between 38.88778433380732 and 38.891917997746894 and longitude between -77.01269830654866 and -77.00613225870377 and epoch_timestamp between 1609954200 and 1610067600 Returned quite a number of mobile devices accurate to the meter. Was fun to see which phone was in which room or blade of grass of the building. I'm not even American.
- iamacyborg 6y agoYeah, that raises a whole bunch of other ethical questions though, like why you’re able to do this, what access to PII you have and why you’re able to run queries like this on a Saturday. I hope your employers keeps track of stuff like this.
- avdlinde 6y agoMy guess is that this being possible would be the norm, rather than the exception. And that keeping track of individual queries is not.
- iamacyborg 6y agoWell, that sounds worrying.
- Raed667 6y agoDoes your company log every select query you do on your prod db? If yes, does it automatically raise alerts when PII is accessed? I'm genuinely asking, I have never seen such a setup.
- iamacyborg 6y agoIt does not. Maybe it should though. I know a company I worked at logged everything that was done or accessed within our Salesforce instance, maybe something needs to be done like that rather than allowing folks to run arbitrary sql queries against the database.