4 ms·
Your location data. Tower associations can still happen with data "off", since there's plenty of "listen" components. All your home wifi connections are well Ge
by jvanderbot 4y ago
Your location data. Tower associations can still happen with data "off", since there's plenty of "listen" components. All your home wifi connections are well Geo-located, thanks to other Android users picking up the ESSID as they walk / ride / drive past your house. Your shopping / outings? Forget it, fully known.
VPNs hide the content of connections, at least from MITM / eavesdroppers, but server-side data scrapes are quite effective at figuring out who you are (or what your phone is ... see below). Nothing really does a good job of hiding the fact that you are connected to a VPN except TOR, and where that connection originates (e.g., your wifi network, which is well Geo-located, remember?). And de-anonymization of VPN connections to identify downstream connections are possible, IIRC. Details about your phone are well recorded (MAC, SID, etc)
And always remember, your phone can be implicated based on location data, which will implicate you once it's discovered you own the phone. And that's as simple as looking up the SIM purchase / use.
- RektBoy 4y agoIn my country, this one girl is buying prepaid SIMs and selling them on darknet. Which is fully legal. Still she got notified from our intelligence agency, lol. They're butt-hurt a lot from this.
- kornhole 4y agoFrom https://grapheneos.org/faq https://grapheneos.org/faq: "Connecting to your carrier's network inherently depends on you identifying yourself to it and anyone able to obtain administrative access. Activating airplane mode will fully disable the cellular radio transmit and receive capabilities, which will prevent your phone from being reached from the cellular network and stop your carrier (and anyone impersonating them to you) from tracking the device via the cellular radio. The baseband implements other functionality such as Wi-Fi and GPS functionality, but each of these components is separately sandboxed on the baseband and independent of each other. Enabling airplane mode disables the cellular radio, but Wi-Fi can be re-enabled and used without activating the cellular radio again. This allows using the device as a Wi-Fi only device." When I am at home, I am WIFI only. When I am out, WIFI & bluetooth are off. This takes some discipline at first but then just becomes habit. I know the spot on my commute home where I switch my settings.
- MengerSponge 4y agoBTW habitually switching at the same time and place is terrible opsec. It leaks a ton of information.
- thewataccount 4y agoYeah I'm not sure what information this really protects assuming you're only communicating over encrypted channels (https) already. In theory it could protect location data from the carrier for locating you with a wild amount of opsec practice but I highly doubt you could pull that off for a daily driver. Having wifi/bluetooth off in public isn't a terrible idea though as those are generally much easier attack surfaces and are leakier.
- kornhole 4y agoIt is the same general location about half a mile from home where I flip over. This is to ensure location from cell tower triangulation does not identify my home and therefore me.
- Retric 4y agoIt’s all about your threat model. Suppose you wanted to find someone that aways turned on their phone on at ~8:15 AM and found someone that always turned their phone off at ~8:10 AM within 15 miles. How difficult would you say it was to make this connection?