9 ms·

The “Location Off” switch on your phone is a lie

188 points by gjsman-1000 4y ago

m3kw9 4y ago
And even if your phone is off it’s not off
- ridgered4 4y ago
  And you can't remove the battery on most new phones either.
crazygringo 4y ago
Seems like a strawman to me. I've never heard anybody think setting "location services" to "off" prevented your cell service from detecting your location and presence, which can then of course be shared with law enforcement. The toggle is for not sharing your location with installed applications. I think everybody knows that if it's important not to be tracked by law enforcement (e.g. attending an illegal protest), you don't take your phone in the first place. (And certainly everyone on HN already knows.) So no, the location switch is not a lie.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Hello, article author here. I wrote the article to notify an audience a little bit broader than Hacker News. There are many people who seem to think that it's only Google or Apple or Facebook they need to worry about; or that if they get GrapheneOS they are now really-secure and really-private (which they are, from Google, but not really overall). The very idea that their cellphone carrier may have their location, even without their phone cooperating, is often a foreign idea they never thought of. This is, of course, a very long rabbit trail that never ends. Your license plate could get scanned. You could get picked up on cameras and run through facial recognition. But it's still important to call out areas that people may not have considered. Imagine a journalist - if nobody calls this out because "everyone knows," she might have installed GrapheneOS, signed up for ProtonMail, paid with cash for a SIM card, and gone off to cover some story without realizing this blind spot. > I think everybody knows that if it's important not to be tracked by law enforcement (e.g. attending an illegal protest), you don't take your phone in the first place. My home state would not have almost every police department armed to the teeth with IMSI Catchers if everybody just knew they weren't supposed to do that.
  - megablast 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - WheatMillington 4y ago
      How is this a click bait title? Hacker News commenters often have a bad perspective on how non-tech people ought to see the world, and this is a great example. I'm not in tech, so I find it entirely reasonable to expect that if my phone has a "location tracking off" switch, it will disable location tracking. I honestly can't comprehend why you think this isn't a reasonable point of view.
      - dendriti 4y ago
        There's been a bizarre shift in discourse about privacy in the last 15 years. When most of these posters were young, they actually cared about keeping their personal information private. The idea that you would carry around a device with a location tracker that could only be turned off by deactivating the device, would have been horrifying. Now, at least on HN, these same people are saying This is Fine. Maybe their companies depend on exploiting the ignorant.
        nequo 4y ago
        Cell phones 15 years ago still leaked location information via the cell tower they connected to, didn’t they? This doesn’t seem like a development from the past 15 years like you’re saying. So if you were privacy conscious to that extent 15 years ago, you didn’t carry a cell phone. That didn’t change.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    I think a very important question is "what would you prefer this switch to say"?
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Also the accuracy of GPS is quite a bit higher than that of the accidental locating functionality of triangulating cell phone towers.
  - cloudripper 4y ago
    I know of a few occasions [0] when missing persons were found stranded in the mountains due to the assistance of cell tower triangulation. That said, it's a pain to get any element of accuracy and in the US, it takes a lengthy legal process for law enforcement to obtain that data. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64911138 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64911138
    - j16sdiz 4y ago
      Wasn't the "enhanced 911" thing supposed to give the law enforcement all the location information when you dial 911?
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    This just isn't the case with modern phones. 5G and 4G use active beam forming. It usually only takes a single tower to figure out bearing and signal strength can indicate range. With just one tower, a carrier knows where a 5G phone is within 10m. Combining multiple towers shrinks that rapidly.
- Spivak 4y ago
  > attending an illegal protest Otherwise known as a protest that isn't a 5k with signs and legally classified as a parade.
  - asynchronous 4y ago
    Seriously. In the states you have to get permission beforehand to protest, which imo destroys the point of it.
    - gowld 4y ago
      There is a difference between "protest" and "civil disobedience".
    - WoahNoun 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure most of the George Floyd protests didn't ask for permission beforehand.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      No state requires permission to protest. States do require permission to block the streets. However, the courts force such permitting decisions to be neutral to the political message.
      - asynchronous 4y ago
        No, you need a permit in MANY states before ANY public “demonstration”. That is the same as asking permission.
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Source? As far as I'm aware no jurisdiction in U.S. has a blanket ban everywhere, only in certain downtown areas, roadways, etc...
        HWR_14 4y ago
        That's just factually wrong in the US. ACLU: "If marchers stay on the sidewalks and obey traffic and pedestrian signals, their activity is constitutionally protected even without a permit." There are a few other things to avoid (blocking other pedestrians, using sound amplification devices) without a permit. And of course, private property owners can set their own rules.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  I think amongst the technically literate here on HN, probably 99% know what the switch does. But amongst the public at large there are ABSOLUTELY people that think the location button is magic. Non-technically literate people need protection just as much as us, and this the way this button is labelled fails them.
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    Article author here. This is exactly my point. This could be so much clearer. Think about when you open a private window in Chrome. There's a clear warning that your ISP or school or employer may know what websites you visit anyway. But there's no such warning for smartphones. It just says "Location: Off" and people don't know.
    - gowld 4y ago
      https://support.google.com/android/answer/3467281 https://support.google.com/android/answer/3467281 Linked from Location Setting. But it doesn't mention carrier tracking your location. That is fundamental to how cell phones work, though, unless you enable Airplane Mode.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        Airplane mode is also a lie (https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9l57b6/my_phone_was_in_airplane_mode_and_i_still/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9l57b6/m...)
        circuit10 4y ago
        Could it be receiving signals but not sending them, or is that not how it works?
        autoexec 4y ago
        I think you'd have to be sending and receiving to stay connected to the towers at all. I haven't tried it, but if it's true that you can still call 911 while in airplane mode then you're certainly sending and receiving. What we need is a "No really, all radios off" switch, preferably a hardware switch, but if we had one maybe people would opt of being tracked all the time.
- gerdesj 4y ago
  Did you actually read the blog? The second para starts: "Well, that would be the case if we lived in an ideal world, but that switch is more of a polite “please don’t” than an actual deterrent." FFS this isn't /. 8)
  - hoppyhoppy2 4y ago
    >Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - gerdesj 4y ago
      I think it is important that a discussion about something should actually involve the original something. Informed discussion should be ... informed. I think it is facile to appear to actively encourage discussion that is demonstrably uninformed of the OP.
      - laristine 4y ago
        Yes, and you can do so by saying "the article mentions that..." like gp pointed out.
        gerdesj 4y ago
        Yes, and I think that is debating semantics. I do understand that a site might have a house style or whatever but what exactly did I do wrong? Why can I not call out a comment for being misinformed at best because the commenter clearly didn't read the article that they are commenting on?
        jrockway 4y ago
        Presumably you're commenting to rectify the misinformation, and you can get to the meat of it one sentence sooner if you skip the personal attack. You already know the person you're replying to doesn't read everything in front of them. Why give them more to read? Why open with a personal attack? It never makes people like you.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- croes 4y ago
  More like we already know the switch is a lie
- dbtc 4y ago
  Yeah but it should.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >I've never heard anybody think setting "location services" to "off" prevented your cell service from detecting your location and presence, which can then of course be shared with law enforcement. Notice the article authors' age. Unlike most of us, they likely never used a pre-internet-capable cellphone.
- nvr219 4y ago
  Agreed. The article talks about going to politically unpopular protests. Anyone who attends those is educated on not taking their phones with them when the stakes are that high.
- GuB-42 4y ago
  A bit like icognito/private mode in browsers. It is only private on your side, it changes nothing for the sites you visit or their partners, they can still track you, and your IP address is still visible. It is not a blocker like uBlock, though in the case of Firefox, turning on private mode also enables a builtin blocker. It is explained clearly when you open Incognito mode in Chrome, and people complained that it doesn't do what it says it doesn't.
- ProAm 4y ago
  People on here may be surprised that the off button also doesn't really turn it off.
  - m463 4y ago
    "Find My" will find an iphone that is off. even with wifi/bluetooth/location services turned off, apple constantly connects to *.ls.apple.com. sigh.
    - kornhole 4y ago
      Yes there is no way to avoid Apple knowing where you are at all times. It is possible to turn off Google's location knowledge on an Android with a little tinkering, but that can break some things.
    - t0bia_s 4y ago
      Is this also happens if you have no data?
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > I've never heard anybody think setting "location services" to "off" prevented your cell service from detecting your location Outside of the HN bubble, many. Besides, the point stands: the UI is misleading. A phone should clearly show to the user what data is sent, where and why, without any exception.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    Really?! Downvoted for this?
- coldtea 4y ago
  >I've never heard anybody think setting "location services" to "off" prevented your cell service from detecting your location and presence You'd be quite surprised at what people do believe.
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  On the original iPhone the location switch was basically real. Location services burned a ton of battery and law enforcement's ping capability was rudimentary. Back then turning the switch off made a smartphone as difficult to locate as a dumbphone. The phone had to exert a lot of energy to know where it was even within a city block. I'm not convinced this has changed much. Obviously if the Eye of Sauron chooses to focus on your location there's no way to avoid it but I would bet that mundane cell phone location logs are sharply limited by tower storage, CPU limits, and probably by software licensing. I'd be interested to hear from a cell tower software engineer.
- than3 4y ago
  Yet the toggle is automatically on for a number of applications even when it says its turned off. That still makes its existence a misleading coercive lie giving you the illusion of control; for those that don't already know better. These dark patterns should be illegal (and in fact are if you take a strict constructional meaning from deceptive and unfair business practices already codified in law). Its just effective enforcement of antitrust, and FTC violations simply isn't occurring at these monoliths.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  >> if it's important not to be tracked by law enforcement (e.g. attending an illegal protest), you don't take your phone in the first place These days it won't help, thanks to our friends from the AI department. Anyone's identity is easily found from the cameras filming the illegal protest.
- NoPicklez 4y ago
  As someone (like many of us) who had phones pre-smartphone, it's pretty obvious to me that switching location services off was only to prevent apps from doing so. Your carrier has in my mind, always been able to determine your location. We had movies doing triangulation based on phone calls to catch criminals. The guy who wrote the article was 21, so it's not a stretch to think they only grew up in the smartphone world and didn't have that base understanding.
- _8j50 4y ago
  No, I fully expect GPS to be off even though cell provider can still triangulate my location. On airplane mode I expect both things to be off. Now, I would like to know what is stopping a class action suit on this subject.
- xnx 4y ago
  I'm guessing there's a big overlap in the population that thinks "locations services" set to "off" protects their location also thinks that "incognito" hides their identify even when they log in to a site.
- ComplexSystems 4y ago
  "I think everybody knows that if it's important not to be tracked by law enforcement (e.g. attending an illegal protest), you don't take your phone in the first place." This is because they know that the "location off" switch is a lie.
- webinvest 4y ago
  What about just turning your phone off?
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  They gotta track you enough to pick the right tower to ring your phone.
WoahNoun 4y ago
This entire blog post can be summarized as "21 year old discovers how cell towers work."
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  More like "21 year old tells other, regular, uninformed people how cell towers work."
  - WoahNoun 4y ago
    You submitted it yourself to HN. Do you think the audience of HN is "other, regular, uninformed people?"
    - gjsman-1000 4y ago
      How else would you propose getting it into a top search result for Google? ;) But seriously, it could be useful for people to share with family or friends who aren't technical. You never know.
    - kevingadd 4y ago
      I think it's reasonable to guess that not all HN readers - there are very, very many people who read HN - are experts on a technology as complex as modern wireless communications.
      - bmicraft 4y ago
        Nothing has changed about this in the last thirty years
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
I'm actually not sure what exactly is accomplished by toggling Location Services off. For example, I have Android 11, and AIUI, several methods are used to get a fix on location. Does the LS button turn off the GPS/GNSS radios only? What about WiFi location services? Are those disabled by the button too? Bluetooth, is that a thing?
- brookst 4y ago
  It just means the system location APIs won't return a location. There's no attempt to detect if an app is using e.g. inertial guidance or a database of SSIDs to estimate locatiom.
  - bmicraft 4y ago
    Scanning ssids requires the location permission on Android. Turning location off temporarily revokes the location permission for all apps (system included)
    - brookst 4y ago
      Thanks, did not know that!
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > I'm actually not sure what exactly is accomplished by toggling Location Services off. I couldn't find an analogous article by Google, but Apple does a pretty good job of explaining this: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/location-services/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/location-service...
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  It depends on the settings on your phone. There's the location toggle, which will limit almost all location API access to apps on your phone. There's a toggle for WiFi/Bluetooth scanning in the background, which is used to quickly connect to devices that come into range and to help get a quicker fix on your location once you do enable it. This type of scanning will continue even if you disable location services through the default button, though apps on your phone won't be able to use them. I'm not entirely sure how the Bluetooth thing is supposed to work, I'm guessing some places have Bluetooth beacons? Disabling location services should also disable the GPS/GLONASS/etc. chip because it's not useful. In theory the Android system could activate the chip of course, but in any clean ROM it won't. If you're trying to protect your location from the apps on your phone, you'll most likely be fine just disabling location services. Pay attention: some phones have a location toggle that actually only disables GPS, you may need to long press the toggle to get it to turn off all location services. IP geolocation is also easy to implement, so consider using a VPN to make it hard to track you through your internet connection. If you try to protect yourself from external factors, you're in for a challenge. Overrides may exist, for example when you call the emergency services; location services and GPS will turn on and send a GPS fix to the emergency services. Furthermore, if your phone has even a semblance of a cellular connection, triangulation from the ISP side becomes an option. With LTE, and especially mmWave, tracking from a cell tower becomes painfully accurate. If you're on some large WiFi network, for example a building with tens or hundreds of WiFi access points, an active WiFi connection can be tracked very easily as well (down to the centimeter with the right firmware on the APs). If you want to protect yourself from passive scanners that respond to your phone's WiFi scanning signal, be sure to keep MAC address randomisation enabled. Also consider making your phone use random MAC addresses when connecting to WiFi access points in case someone fakes an access point to get your phone to reveal its real MAC address. This isn't foolproof, there are ways to determine your phone's brand, model, and even the firmware version through WiFi probes if your adversary has enough information on it, simply based on the extra options set in the WiFi packet header and the order of them. Using any Bluetooh devices also makes it easy to track you as you can't use random MAC addresses with Bluetooth peripherals. If you want safety from external tracking, disable all communication systems unless absolutely necessary. If you just want to disable app tracking, retract location permissions or disable location services. One final note: some apps have been caught going through photos in your gallery, extracting the time and date of the picture together with the GPS tag in them. This allows apps with media permissions to build up a location history if you've been taking pictures. Be wary of unnecessary full media permissions; apps generally don't need them as there are APIs that allow apps to select a single file or folder.
diebeforei485 4y ago
How about turning the phone off, or setting it to Airplane Mode?
- m463 4y ago
  You would have to trust that those things work as you expect. for example, "Find My" can find your iphone even if it is turned off.
  - diebeforei485 4y ago
    By default, yes. The same way transit cards can work with your phone off. It's the sensible default option and it can be disabled in settings.
WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago
On a second note, Android will store the last Location that was valid if Location is On but there's no GPS updates.
nneonneo 4y ago
Well, and then there’s the problem of your carrier sharing your location with a parade of location data companies, some of whom will hand that data to just about anyone [1,2]. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-hunters-att-tmobile-sprint-customer-location-data-years https://www.vice.com/en/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-hunte... [2] https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/18/technology/cell-phone-location-data-breach-locationsmart/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/18/technology/cell-phone-locat...
- sneak 4y ago
  Important reason to never use mobile carrier internet without a VPN. Otherwise they can see all your hostnames via SNI, and the services all get your carrier IP for linking.
quitit 4y ago
The basis for this article is contrived. While I don't think an ordinary user would possess the knowledge that their cellular function relies on their respective telco knowing their approximate location at all times, I also don't think an ordinary user would be misled by this toggle, especially as further information is readily available, particularly so on iOS, with the first line of the click through directly underneath it reading: "Location Services allows Apple and third-party apps and websites to gather and use information based on the current location of your iPhone..." Before delving into further lengthly, but transparent, detail. Anyone who was concerned about their location being revealed this way would certainly be more careful than to just flick a singular toggle and call it a day.
gowld 4y ago
This is a poor writeup of very old news. https://www.google.com/search?q=location+services+lawsuit https://www.google.com/search?q=location+services+lawsuit
nemothekid 4y ago
Interesting. It's weird to see the generation of people who only ever used smartphones start to think about this stuff. In the past, at least in crime shows, the police could track your location for even "dumbphones" using the method in this article; therefore the common wisdom has been "use a burner/take the battery out/dont take your phone". But now that phones have GPS + location switch, the "legacy" method is no longer front of mind.
13of40 4y ago
A couple of months ago, I speculated on this very forum that there must be companies that actively hoover up all of you app and cookie data to build an on-demand profile of you. Someone pointed me to "acxiom", which grudgingly, over the course of two months gave me a dump of what they knew about me. A lot of it was wrong, but they knew what stores I shopped at, my diet, and what cars I was considering buying. Disturbingly, they had a list of third parties who had purchased information about me, and one was an unnamed healthcare provider who had bought my location data. So, that's where we are as a society now. Sleep tight.
- Teever 4y ago
  Can you talk more about how you got your data from them?
  - 13of40 4y ago
    They just had a button for it. The SLA was 45 days, but they slipped that by another week or two. And based on what I got it actually took them about 50 nanoseconds.
    - Domenic_S 4y ago
      link to request: https://www.acxiom.com/about-us/privacy/ https://www.acxiom.com/about-us/privacy/
      - unethical_ban 4y ago
        I got blocked by their Imperva WAF because I'm using a VPN. How appropriate.
      - t0bia_s 4y ago
        www.acxiom.com is being blocked by Lightswitch05 - Ads & Tracking, CAMELEON, 1Hosts (Lite) and 1Hosts (Pro). NextDNS filter.
      - Brendinooo 4y ago
kornhole 4y ago
This is what I have done for years: Cellular is always off anywhere near my house. I only turn on cellular when needed. I use Graphene which allows WIFI to be used without cellular for my VOIP calls on voip.ms or jmp.chat. I have been using prepaid cash purchased SIMs but might switch to silent.link. The only way for the carrier to know where I am is if they do something funny on the proprietary baseband modem.
- dmbche 4y ago
  Doesn't your phone ping off the tower regularely anyway? I've always understood that without a physical switch to the antenna there's no way to actually know
  - kornhole 4y ago
    Yes that was my caveat about the proprietary baseband modem that we cannot totally control. If I was in a different threat model category, I would use a phone with physical switch to the baseband. Those devices like Pinephone and Librem that only run Linux are not quite mature enough to fit my needs. They may be my next choice.
    - dmbche 4y ago
      Very cool! I looked into it a little bit, a good option depending on your threat model is to simply leave it in a faraday container (read: aluminum foil envelope - or the more sophisticated stuff) when you don't want it to be visible. But then, you kind of have to let go of having that phone usable at home at all, and end up having a "dirty" and a "clean" phone. Then again, just useful depending on your threat model.
- its_ethan 4y ago
  I gotta ask... why? It's your house, anyone who could get your info from a teleco and wants to know your location almost certainly knows your home address, so this is just to protect from know when you're at your house? If you're still turning on cellular around town too, a decently useful map of your location history would exist anyway? I'm not trying to be snarky or anything, I'm genuinely curious here what the benefit is to you.
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
> Better to leave the phone at home. Or, at least in a Faraday cage you can remove it from if you are desperate. There have been cases where the phone _going offline_ during the "event" have been used as evidence.
wkat4242 4y ago
Airplane mode should do that though. Of course with the negative that you're not able to do anything online, but well... You can't have your cake and eat it :) In the old days we had pagers to be still reachable and yet anonymous. But those networks have died out pretty much everywhere, sadly.
- morepork 4y ago
  Aeroplane mode doesn't stop the phone receiving GPS signals. It may also leave wifi and/or bluetooth on which can give a coarse location. The phone's accelerometers will still run in aeroplane mode which can infer a surprising amount about your location.
  - ridgered4 4y ago
    > The phone's accelerometers will still run in aeroplane mode which can infer a surprising amount about your location. I've heard of most of these but this one is new. How does this work? Are the accelerometers used to basically track direction and distance from a last known location?
paulpauper 4y ago
There is a reason why "leave your phone at home" is well-worn advice and a common refrain in opsec communities. You can never really know for sure what is being tracked.
- hnburnsy 4y ago
  I wonder if now or in the near future in court cases leaving your phone at home is circumstantial evidence of possible wrong doing. "Mr Defendant, records show that you carry your phone 99% of the time you leave home, except on the night in question"
itissid 4y ago
There are a lot of "lies" when it comes to location based ecosystem and permissioning on modern smart phones. 1. The fact is that some applications require any access to the physical location(lat long) to function is a lie. For example many app just needs to know if you are at "home/work/fav place" without knowing the lat long of it e.g. function for Assistant based Reminders to be triggered. yet google or ios just make access to location a creepy sounding binary permission with a less creepy variation on preciseness of location access. In reality these should be two permissions. 2. The fact that some apps need background location access to function is a lie. Locations can remain on the phone only for many apps and this can be enforced as a permission or the OS. For example Navigation can be done by rendering the blue dot on a screen and that is technically doable at a privileged OS level service without exposing the lat long info to apps. The apps just need to provide tiles and relevant styles to render. Garmin like navigators have been doing it for years with hardware older than smartphones. Google lies to you when it says it needs your lat long to function. In reality its just needed to target you with ads. "Nearby" functionality could be enforced by sharing location in an encrypted fashion through P2P networks, though apple in fairness is doing better at privacy of location sharing; Google has none of this AFAIK and at worst they both retain the data(or atleast we have no confidence if they do or not). In reality background location access could be almost exclusively be made more private by being on device only for many apps. 3. The fact that Google/Apple are doing public good by providing location permission is a lie. Try turning off precise location in a Google supported Android, the experience is horrible. 4. Non PlayStore installations on AOSP by other providers could be somehow better for Location Privacy is a lie. I will never buy a samsung phone because they are very likely to install various Location, Wifi, BLE Service Providers for serving up data for Location or Location Inference which is lucrative to closed ecosystems of Apps by Big Tech(FAANG et. al). These services are more of black and back room deals that don't show up conspicuously in public discussions and undermine privacy. Better and more nuanced permissioning can really help a lot of location based apps to thrive. But Google and Apple have made anyone but their own apps have to choose between being creepy or not.
RektBoy 4y ago
Don't tell him this, but your home location is leaking through the wifi probes too, oh my gawd nobody knew right?
- 3np 4y ago
  There are ways around that. MAC address randomization is necessary but not sufficient. https://ido2016.sciencesconf.org/122873/Privacy_v4.pdf https://ido2016.sciencesconf.org/122873/Privacy_v4.pdf
raincom 4y ago
Even if you turn off your phones, NSA can trace out your location, according to Snowden files.
prepend 4y ago
If you’re going to murder someone just don’t take your phone. Otherwise, I don’t think this article is really anything. Did people think that their networking didn’t reveal location? Or that joining Wi-Fi networks didn’t reveal. All this setting means is that your phone won’t tell apps. It doesn’t mean that you’re impossible to find.
ChancyChance 4y ago
The EFF has had privacy guidelines for decades that cover this. Click on the menu for a list of sites and videos to help improve your privacy hygiene: https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/
m3kw9 4y ago
Been day one thing for towers to be able to triangulate your locations but most people just didn’t realize
visitor997 4y ago
[flagged]
GenericDev 4y ago
I know :( We have no privacy anymore, and no recourse to take it back.
ramesh31 4y ago
Everything is a lie. From the moment you pick up your phone (literally) everything you do is tracked. Every touch, every gesture, every tap, every app, even the temporal data of what you didn't do. It's all tracked by someone, somewhere, for something. And it's all discoverable under subpoena. The only solution is to return to monke. Live a completely analog or air-gapped lifestyle outside of what is required from you for work. I'm so sick of it. Fuck everything about participating in the surveillance state.
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
Carriers have been able to (at least roughly) determine your location for as long as there have been cell phones. This isn’t news.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  Even before e911 was implemented on all the phones I could ping phones and give the FBI the approximate location and direction based on cell site handoffs. I had to use RF engineering maps that were overlaid on street maps but it worked. This was in 1997 on a GSM network.
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    I’m aware of a court case almost a decade earlier where cell phone location information was introduced into evidence.
    - LinuxBender 4y ago
      I believe it. Even on AMPS and D-AMPS one could still get approximate location. It just wouldn't be quite as accurate but if all you need is a neighborhood it could suffice.
korginator 4y ago
Your cell provider can always determine the location of your cellular device. They always have. Now with 4G and 5G it is easier for trusted services to get extremely precise details about the location of your device [1][2]. The example in the second link shows the details that the cellular network provider may have, and this includes the Cell tower ID, the enodeBID (4G), tracking area (TA) ID, geolocation, information about whether the device is moving (its velocity), the mobile country code (MCC), mobile network code (MNC), and a whole lot more. This data is already with your cellular network provider, so it makes no difference if you have "switched off" location services on your phone. [1] The Open5G Lab APIs https://swagger.open5glab.net/ https://swagger.open5glab.net/ [2] An example location tracking request https://swagger.open5glab.net/#/MonitoringEvent%20API%20Subscription%20level%20POST%20Operation/post__scsAsId__subscriptions https://swagger.open5glab.net/#/MonitoringEvent%20API%20Subs...
preordained 4y ago
If you ever believed such a thing for a moment, I have a bridge to sell you. A big one!
zbaxrl 4y ago
In 2009, a german politician got his location data from his carrier and made a visualization. https://web.archive.org/web/20150101020635/https://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention https://web.archive.org/web/20150101020635/https://www.zeit....
hnburnsy 4y ago
At least on an iPhone you can stop carrier location tracking by powering it off or removing the SIM car......oh crap!
hnburnsy 4y ago
Wait until the author hears about that power off switch onrecent iPhones!
- dgivney 4y ago
  OMG madness! What's next? A Turbo button that actually slows down the CPU!?
- iJohnDoe 4y ago
  Unless I misunderstood your comment - Find My iPhone still works when the iPhone is turned off. On new iPhones, it even says it on the screen that the iPhone is still findable when powered off. What might be interesting, you turn location services off in the settings while the iPhone is turned on. Then power off iPhone and effectively turn location services back on via Find My iPhone.
lm28469 4y ago
Isn't it obvious that it's a GPS switch, not a "I'm invisible" switch ? If you care about battery life you should keep it off unless you need directions anyways
XxCincinnatusxX 4y ago
https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2023/smartphones-popular-qualcomm-chip-secretly-share-private-information-us-chip-maker https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2023/smartphones-popular-qualc... I would think if the phones are doing this, there's no telling what else we don't know about them. I've decided now that it's pretty much "Game Over" when it comes to any privacy on a phone.
garyfirestorm 4y ago
I guess the question is - is there an open source software that forces the cellular modem to communicate only to one tower (of your choice)? this way, the exact location will never be known?
- eimrine 4y ago
  There is no FOSS in GSM/CDMA world, these technologies are closed as hell and there is no open information about the sim-card computers. Almost any old GSM phone (at least Siemens and Nokia) can chose towers voluntary - but in too developed countries having too small size on the globus everything pre-3G is disabled.
moremetadata 4y ago
[dead]

188 points by gjsman-1000 4y ago

m3kw9 4y ago

And even if your phone is off it’s not off

ridgered4 4y ago
And you can't remove the battery on most new phones either.

crazygringo 4y ago

Seems like a strawman to me. I've never heard anybody think setting "location services" to "off" prevented your cell service from detecting your location and presence, which can then of course be shared with law enforcement. The toggle is for not sharing your location with installed applications. I think everybody knows that if it's important not to be tracked by law enforcement (e.g. attending an illegal protest), you don't take your phone in the first place. (And certainly everyone on HN already knows.) So no, the location switch is not a lie.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Hello, article author here. I wrote the article to notify an audience a little bit broader than Hacker News. There are many people who seem to think that it's only Google or Apple or Facebook they need to worry about; or that if they get GrapheneOS they are now really-secure and really-private (which they are, from Google, but not really overall). The very idea that their cellphone carrier may have their location, even without their phone cooperating, is often a foreign idea they never thought of. This is, of course, a very long rabbit trail that never ends. Your license plate could get scanned. You could get picked up on cameras and run through facial recognition. But it's still important to call out areas that people may not have considered. Imagine a journalist - if nobody calls this out because "everyone knows," she might have installed GrapheneOS, signed up for ProtonMail, paid with cash for a SIM card, and gone off to cover some story without realizing this blind spot. > I think everybody knows that if it's important not to be tracked by law enforcement (e.g. attending an illegal protest), you don't take your phone in the first place. My home state would not have almost every police department armed to the teeth with IMSI Catchers if everybody just knew they weren't supposed to do that.
- megablast 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - WheatMillington 4y ago
    How is this a click bait title? Hacker News commenters often have a bad perspective on how non-tech people ought to see the world, and this is a great example. I'm not in tech, so I find it entirely reasonable to expect that if my phone has a "location tracking off" switch, it will disable location tracking. I honestly can't comprehend why you think this isn't a reasonable point of view.
    - dendriti 4y ago
      There's been a bizarre shift in discourse about privacy in the last 15 years. When most of these posters were young, they actually cared about keeping their personal information private. The idea that you would carry around a device with a location tracker that could only be turned off by deactivating the device, would have been horrifying. Now, at least on HN, these same people are saying This is Fine. Maybe their companies depend on exploiting the ignorant.
      - nequo 4y ago
        Cell phones 15 years ago still leaked location information via the cell tower they connected to, didn’t they? This doesn’t seem like a development from the past 15 years like you’re saying. So if you were privacy conscious to that extent 15 years ago, you didn’t carry a cell phone. That didn’t change.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  I think a very important question is "what would you prefer this switch to say"?
tinus_hn 4y ago
Also the accuracy of GPS is quite a bit higher than that of the accidental locating functionality of triangulating cell phone towers.
- cloudripper 4y ago
  I know of a few occasions [0] when missing persons were found stranded in the mountains due to the assistance of cell tower triangulation. That said, it's a pain to get any element of accuracy and in the US, it takes a lengthy legal process for law enforcement to obtain that data. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64911138 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64911138
  - j16sdiz 4y ago
    Wasn't the "enhanced 911" thing supposed to give the law enforcement all the location information when you dial 911?
- HWR_14 4y ago
  This just isn't the case with modern phones. 5G and 4G use active beam forming. It usually only takes a single tower to figure out bearing and signal strength can indicate range. With just one tower, a carrier knows where a 5G phone is within 10m. Combining multiple towers shrinks that rapidly.
Spivak 4y ago
> attending an illegal protest Otherwise known as a protest that isn't a 5k with signs and legally classified as a parade.
- asynchronous 4y ago
  Seriously. In the states you have to get permission beforehand to protest, which imo destroys the point of it.
  - gowld 4y ago
    There is a difference between "protest" and "civil disobedience".
  - WoahNoun 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure most of the George Floyd protests didn't ask for permission beforehand.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    No state requires permission to protest. States do require permission to block the streets. However, the courts force such permitting decisions to be neutral to the political message.
    - asynchronous 4y ago
      No, you need a permit in MANY states before ANY public “demonstration”. That is the same as asking permission.
      - MichaelZuo 4y ago
        Source? As far as I'm aware no jurisdiction in U.S. has a blanket ban everywhere, only in certain downtown areas, roadways, etc...
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        That's just factually wrong in the US. ACLU: "If marchers stay on the sidewalks and obey traffic and pedestrian signals, their activity is constitutionally protected even without a permit." There are a few other things to avoid (blocking other pedestrians, using sound amplification devices) without a permit. And of course, private property owners can set their own rules.
advisedwang 4y ago
I think amongst the technically literate here on HN, probably 99% know what the switch does. But amongst the public at large there are ABSOLUTELY people that think the location button is magic. Non-technically literate people need protection just as much as us, and this the way this button is labelled fails them.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Article author here. This is exactly my point. This could be so much clearer. Think about when you open a private window in Chrome. There's a clear warning that your ISP or school or employer may know what websites you visit anyway. But there's no such warning for smartphones. It just says "Location: Off" and people don't know.
  - gowld 4y ago
    https://support.google.com/android/answer/3467281 https://support.google.com/android/answer/3467281 Linked from Location Setting. But it doesn't mention carrier tracking your location. That is fundamental to how cell phones work, though, unless you enable Airplane Mode.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      Airplane mode is also a lie (https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9l57b6/my_phone_was_in_airplane_mode_and_i_still/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/9l57b6/m...)
      - circuit10 4y ago
        Could it be receiving signals but not sending them, or is that not how it works?
        autoexec 4y ago
        I think you'd have to be sending and receiving to stay connected to the towers at all. I haven't tried it, but if it's true that you can still call 911 while in airplane mode then you're certainly sending and receiving. What we need is a "No really, all radios off" switch, preferably a hardware switch, but if we had one maybe people would opt of being tracked all the time.
gerdesj 4y ago
Did you actually read the blog? The second para starts: "Well, that would be the case if we lived in an ideal world, but that switch is more of a polite “please don’t” than an actual deterrent." FFS this isn't /. 8)
- hoppyhoppy2 4y ago
  >Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - gerdesj 4y ago
    I think it is important that a discussion about something should actually involve the original something. Informed discussion should be ... informed. I think it is facile to appear to actively encourage discussion that is demonstrably uninformed of the OP.
    - laristine 4y ago
      Yes, and you can do so by saying "the article mentions that..." like gp pointed out.
      - gerdesj 4y ago
        Yes, and I think that is debating semantics. I do understand that a site might have a house style or whatever but what exactly did I do wrong? Why can I not call out a comment for being misinformed at best because the commenter clearly didn't read the article that they are commenting on?
        jrockway 4y ago
        Presumably you're commenting to rectify the misinformation, and you can get to the meat of it one sentence sooner if you skip the personal attack. You already know the person you're replying to doesn't read everything in front of them. Why give them more to read? Why open with a personal attack? It never makes people like you.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
croes 4y ago
More like we already know the switch is a lie
dbtc 4y ago
Yeah but it should.
snvzz 4y ago
>I've never heard anybody think setting "location services" to "off" prevented your cell service from detecting your location and presence, which can then of course be shared with law enforcement. Notice the article authors' age. Unlike most of us, they likely never used a pre-internet-capable cellphone.
nvr219 4y ago
Agreed. The article talks about going to politically unpopular protests. Anyone who attends those is educated on not taking their phones with them when the stakes are that high.
GuB-42 4y ago
A bit like icognito/private mode in browsers. It is only private on your side, it changes nothing for the sites you visit or their partners, they can still track you, and your IP address is still visible. It is not a blocker like uBlock, though in the case of Firefox, turning on private mode also enables a builtin blocker. It is explained clearly when you open Incognito mode in Chrome, and people complained that it doesn't do what it says it doesn't.
ProAm 4y ago
People on here may be surprised that the off button also doesn't really turn it off.
- m463 4y ago
  "Find My" will find an iphone that is off. even with wifi/bluetooth/location services turned off, apple constantly connects to *.ls.apple.com. sigh.
  - kornhole 4y ago
    Yes there is no way to avoid Apple knowing where you are at all times. It is possible to turn off Google's location knowledge on an Android with a little tinkering, but that can break some things.
  - t0bia_s 4y ago
    Is this also happens if you have no data?
goodpoint 4y ago
> I've never heard anybody think setting "location services" to "off" prevented your cell service from detecting your location Outside of the HN bubble, many. Besides, the point stands: the UI is misleading. A phone should clearly show to the user what data is sent, where and why, without any exception.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Really?! Downvoted for this?
coldtea 4y ago
>I've never heard anybody think setting "location services" to "off" prevented your cell service from detecting your location and presence You'd be quite surprised at what people do believe.
StrictDabbler 4y ago
On the original iPhone the location switch was basically real. Location services burned a ton of battery and law enforcement's ping capability was rudimentary. Back then turning the switch off made a smartphone as difficult to locate as a dumbphone. The phone had to exert a lot of energy to know where it was even within a city block. I'm not convinced this has changed much. Obviously if the Eye of Sauron chooses to focus on your location there's no way to avoid it but I would bet that mundane cell phone location logs are sharply limited by tower storage, CPU limits, and probably by software licensing. I'd be interested to hear from a cell tower software engineer.
than3 4y ago
Yet the toggle is automatically on for a number of applications even when it says its turned off. That still makes its existence a misleading coercive lie giving you the illusion of control; for those that don't already know better. These dark patterns should be illegal (and in fact are if you take a strict constructional meaning from deceptive and unfair business practices already codified in law). Its just effective enforcement of antitrust, and FTC violations simply isn't occurring at these monoliths.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
>> if it's important not to be tracked by law enforcement (e.g. attending an illegal protest), you don't take your phone in the first place These days it won't help, thanks to our friends from the AI department. Anyone's identity is easily found from the cameras filming the illegal protest.
NoPicklez 4y ago
As someone (like many of us) who had phones pre-smartphone, it's pretty obvious to me that switching location services off was only to prevent apps from doing so. Your carrier has in my mind, always been able to determine your location. We had movies doing triangulation based on phone calls to catch criminals. The guy who wrote the article was 21, so it's not a stretch to think they only grew up in the smartphone world and didn't have that base understanding.
_8j50 4y ago
No, I fully expect GPS to be off even though cell provider can still triangulate my location. On airplane mode I expect both things to be off. Now, I would like to know what is stopping a class action suit on this subject.
xnx 4y ago
I'm guessing there's a big overlap in the population that thinks "locations services" set to "off" protects their location also thinks that "incognito" hides their identify even when they log in to a site.
ComplexSystems 4y ago
"I think everybody knows that if it's important not to be tracked by law enforcement (e.g. attending an illegal protest), you don't take your phone in the first place." This is because they know that the "location off" switch is a lie.
webinvest 4y ago
What about just turning your phone off?
PaulHoule 4y ago
They gotta track you enough to pick the right tower to ring your phone.

WoahNoun 4y ago

This entire blog post can be summarized as "21 year old discovers how cell towers work."

gjsman-1000 4y ago
More like "21 year old tells other, regular, uninformed people how cell towers work."
- WoahNoun 4y ago
  You submitted it yourself to HN. Do you think the audience of HN is "other, regular, uninformed people?"
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    How else would you propose getting it into a top search result for Google? ;) But seriously, it could be useful for people to share with family or friends who aren't technical. You never know.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    I think it's reasonable to guess that not all HN readers - there are very, very many people who read HN - are experts on a technology as complex as modern wireless communications.
    - bmicraft 4y ago
      Nothing has changed about this in the last thirty years
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

NoZebra120vClip 4y ago

I'm actually not sure what exactly is accomplished by toggling Location Services off. For example, I have Android 11, and AIUI, several methods are used to get a fix on location. Does the LS button turn off the GPS/GNSS radios only? What about WiFi location services? Are those disabled by the button too? Bluetooth, is that a thing?

brookst 4y ago
It just means the system location APIs won't return a location. There's no attempt to detect if an app is using e.g. inertial guidance or a database of SSIDs to estimate locatiom.
- bmicraft 4y ago
  Scanning ssids requires the location permission on Android. Turning location off temporarily revokes the location permission for all apps (system included)
  - brookst 4y ago
    Thanks, did not know that!
CharlesW 4y ago
> I'm actually not sure what exactly is accomplished by toggling Location Services off. I couldn't find an analogous article by Google, but Apple does a pretty good job of explaining this: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/location-services/ https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/location-service...
jeroenhd 4y ago
It depends on the settings on your phone. There's the location toggle, which will limit almost all location API access to apps on your phone. There's a toggle for WiFi/Bluetooth scanning in the background, which is used to quickly connect to devices that come into range and to help get a quicker fix on your location once you do enable it. This type of scanning will continue even if you disable location services through the default button, though apps on your phone won't be able to use them. I'm not entirely sure how the Bluetooth thing is supposed to work, I'm guessing some places have Bluetooth beacons? Disabling location services should also disable the GPS/GLONASS/etc. chip because it's not useful. In theory the Android system could activate the chip of course, but in any clean ROM it won't. If you're trying to protect your location from the apps on your phone, you'll most likely be fine just disabling location services. Pay attention: some phones have a location toggle that actually only disables GPS, you may need to long press the toggle to get it to turn off all location services. IP geolocation is also easy to implement, so consider using a VPN to make it hard to track you through your internet connection. If you try to protect yourself from external factors, you're in for a challenge. Overrides may exist, for example when you call the emergency services; location services and GPS will turn on and send a GPS fix to the emergency services. Furthermore, if your phone has even a semblance of a cellular connection, triangulation from the ISP side becomes an option. With LTE, and especially mmWave, tracking from a cell tower becomes painfully accurate. If you're on some large WiFi network, for example a building with tens or hundreds of WiFi access points, an active WiFi connection can be tracked very easily as well (down to the centimeter with the right firmware on the APs). If you want to protect yourself from passive scanners that respond to your phone's WiFi scanning signal, be sure to keep MAC address randomisation enabled. Also consider making your phone use random MAC addresses when connecting to WiFi access points in case someone fakes an access point to get your phone to reveal its real MAC address. This isn't foolproof, there are ways to determine your phone's brand, model, and even the firmware version through WiFi probes if your adversary has enough information on it, simply based on the extra options set in the WiFi packet header and the order of them. Using any Bluetooh devices also makes it easy to track you as you can't use random MAC addresses with Bluetooth peripherals. If you want safety from external tracking, disable all communication systems unless absolutely necessary. If you just want to disable app tracking, retract location permissions or disable location services. One final note: some apps have been caught going through photos in your gallery, extracting the time and date of the picture together with the GPS tag in them. This allows apps with media permissions to build up a location history if you've been taking pictures. Be wary of unnecessary full media permissions; apps generally don't need them as there are APIs that allow apps to select a single file or folder.

diebeforei485 4y ago

How about turning the phone off, or setting it to Airplane Mode?

m463 4y ago
You would have to trust that those things work as you expect. for example, "Find My" can find your iphone even if it is turned off.
- diebeforei485 4y ago
  By default, yes. The same way transit cards can work with your phone off. It's the sensible default option and it can be disabled in settings.

WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago

On a second note, Android will store the last Location that was valid if Location is On but there's no GPS updates.

nneonneo 4y ago

Well, and then there’s the problem of your carrier sharing your location with a parade of location data companies, some of whom will hand that data to just about anyone [1,2]. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-hunters-att-tmobile-sprint-customer-location-data-years https://www.vice.com/en/article/43z3dn/hundreds-bounty-hunte... [2] https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/18/technology/cell-phone-location-data-breach-locationsmart/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/18/technology/cell-phone-locat...

sneak 4y ago
Important reason to never use mobile carrier internet without a VPN. Otherwise they can see all your hostnames via SNI, and the services all get your carrier IP for linking.

quitit 4y ago

The basis for this article is contrived. While I don't think an ordinary user would possess the knowledge that their cellular function relies on their respective telco knowing their approximate location at all times, I also don't think an ordinary user would be misled by this toggle, especially as further information is readily available, particularly so on iOS, with the first line of the click through directly underneath it reading: "Location Services allows Apple and third-party apps and websites to gather and use information based on the current location of your iPhone..." Before delving into further lengthly, but transparent, detail. Anyone who was concerned about their location being revealed this way would certainly be more careful than to just flick a singular toggle and call it a day.

gowld 4y ago

This is a poor writeup of very old news. https://www.google.com/search?q=location+services+lawsuit https://www.google.com/search?q=location+services+lawsuit

nemothekid 4y ago

Interesting. It's weird to see the generation of people who only ever used smartphones start to think about this stuff. In the past, at least in crime shows, the police could track your location for even "dumbphones" using the method in this article; therefore the common wisdom has been "use a burner/take the battery out/dont take your phone". But now that phones have GPS + location switch, the "legacy" method is no longer front of mind.

13of40 4y ago

A couple of months ago, I speculated on this very forum that there must be companies that actively hoover up all of you app and cookie data to build an on-demand profile of you. Someone pointed me to "acxiom", which grudgingly, over the course of two months gave me a dump of what they knew about me. A lot of it was wrong, but they knew what stores I shopped at, my diet, and what cars I was considering buying. Disturbingly, they had a list of third parties who had purchased information about me, and one was an unnamed healthcare provider who had bought my location data. So, that's where we are as a society now. Sleep tight.

Teever 4y ago
Can you talk more about how you got your data from them?
- 13of40 4y ago
  They just had a button for it. The SLA was 45 days, but they slipped that by another week or two. And based on what I got it actually took them about 50 nanoseconds.
  - Domenic_S 4y ago
    link to request: https://www.acxiom.com/about-us/privacy/ https://www.acxiom.com/about-us/privacy/
    - unethical_ban 4y ago
      I got blocked by their Imperva WAF because I'm using a VPN. How appropriate.
    - t0bia_s 4y ago
      www.acxiom.com is being blocked by Lightswitch05 - Ads & Tracking, CAMELEON, 1Hosts (Lite) and 1Hosts (Pro). NextDNS filter.
    - Brendinooo 4y ago

kornhole 4y ago

This is what I have done for years: Cellular is always off anywhere near my house. I only turn on cellular when needed. I use Graphene which allows WIFI to be used without cellular for my VOIP calls on voip.ms or jmp.chat. I have been using prepaid cash purchased SIMs but might switch to silent.link. The only way for the carrier to know where I am is if they do something funny on the proprietary baseband modem.

dmbche 4y ago
Doesn't your phone ping off the tower regularely anyway? I've always understood that without a physical switch to the antenna there's no way to actually know
- kornhole 4y ago
  Yes that was my caveat about the proprietary baseband modem that we cannot totally control. If I was in a different threat model category, I would use a phone with physical switch to the baseband. Those devices like Pinephone and Librem that only run Linux are not quite mature enough to fit my needs. They may be my next choice.
  - dmbche 4y ago
    Very cool! I looked into it a little bit, a good option depending on your threat model is to simply leave it in a faraday container (read: aluminum foil envelope - or the more sophisticated stuff) when you don't want it to be visible. But then, you kind of have to let go of having that phone usable at home at all, and end up having a "dirty" and a "clean" phone. Then again, just useful depending on your threat model.
its_ethan 4y ago
I gotta ask... why? It's your house, anyone who could get your info from a teleco and wants to know your location almost certainly knows your home address, so this is just to protect from know when you're at your house? If you're still turning on cellular around town too, a decently useful map of your location history would exist anyway? I'm not trying to be snarky or anything, I'm genuinely curious here what the benefit is to you.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago

> Better to leave the phone at home. Or, at least in a Faraday cage you can remove it from if you are desperate. There have been cases where the phone _going offline_ during the "event" have been used as evidence.

wkat4242 4y ago

Airplane mode should do that though. Of course with the negative that you're not able to do anything online, but well... You can't have your cake and eat it :) In the old days we had pagers to be still reachable and yet anonymous. But those networks have died out pretty much everywhere, sadly.

morepork 4y ago
Aeroplane mode doesn't stop the phone receiving GPS signals. It may also leave wifi and/or bluetooth on which can give a coarse location. The phone's accelerometers will still run in aeroplane mode which can infer a surprising amount about your location.
- ridgered4 4y ago
  > The phone's accelerometers will still run in aeroplane mode which can infer a surprising amount about your location. I've heard of most of these but this one is new. How does this work? Are the accelerometers used to basically track direction and distance from a last known location?

paulpauper 4y ago

There is a reason why "leave your phone at home" is well-worn advice and a common refrain in opsec communities. You can never really know for sure what is being tracked.

hnburnsy 4y ago
I wonder if now or in the near future in court cases leaving your phone at home is circumstantial evidence of possible wrong doing. "Mr Defendant, records show that you carry your phone 99% of the time you leave home, except on the night in question"

itissid 4y ago

There are a lot of "lies" when it comes to location based ecosystem and permissioning on modern smart phones. 1. The fact is that some applications require any access to the physical location(lat long) to function is a lie. For example many app just needs to know if you are at "home/work/fav place" without knowing the lat long of it e.g. function for Assistant based Reminders to be triggered. yet google or ios just make access to location a creepy sounding binary permission with a less creepy variation on preciseness of location access. In reality these should be two permissions. 2. The fact that some apps need background location access to function is a lie. Locations can remain on the phone only for many apps and this can be enforced as a permission or the OS. For example Navigation can be done by rendering the blue dot on a screen and that is technically doable at a privileged OS level service without exposing the lat long info to apps. The apps just need to provide tiles and relevant styles to render. Garmin like navigators have been doing it for years with hardware older than smartphones. Google lies to you when it says it needs your lat long to function. In reality its just needed to target you with ads. "Nearby" functionality could be enforced by sharing location in an encrypted fashion through P2P networks, though apple in fairness is doing better at privacy of location sharing; Google has none of this AFAIK and at worst they both retain the data(or atleast we have no confidence if they do or not). In reality background location access could be almost exclusively be made more private by being on device only for many apps. 3. The fact that Google/Apple are doing public good by providing location permission is a lie. Try turning off precise location in a Google supported Android, the experience is horrible. 4. Non PlayStore installations on AOSP by other providers could be somehow better for Location Privacy is a lie. I will never buy a samsung phone because they are very likely to install various Location, Wifi, BLE Service Providers for serving up data for Location or Location Inference which is lucrative to closed ecosystems of Apps by Big Tech(FAANG et. al). These services are more of black and back room deals that don't show up conspicuously in public discussions and undermine privacy. Better and more nuanced permissioning can really help a lot of location based apps to thrive. But Google and Apple have made anyone but their own apps have to choose between being creepy or not.

RektBoy 4y ago

Don't tell him this, but your home location is leaking through the wifi probes too, oh my gawd nobody knew right?

3np 4y ago
There are ways around that. MAC address randomization is necessary but not sufficient. https://ido2016.sciencesconf.org/122873/Privacy_v4.pdf https://ido2016.sciencesconf.org/122873/Privacy_v4.pdf

raincom 4y ago

Even if you turn off your phones, NSA can trace out your location, according to Snowden files.

prepend 4y ago

If you’re going to murder someone just don’t take your phone. Otherwise, I don’t think this article is really anything. Did people think that their networking didn’t reveal location? Or that joining Wi-Fi networks didn’t reveal. All this setting means is that your phone won’t tell apps. It doesn’t mean that you’re impossible to find.

ChancyChance 4y ago

The EFF has had privacy guidelines for decades that cover this. Click on the menu for a list of sites and videos to help improve your privacy hygiene: https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/

m3kw9 4y ago

Been day one thing for towers to be able to triangulate your locations but most people just didn’t realize

visitor997 4y ago

[flagged]

GenericDev 4y ago

I know :( We have no privacy anymore, and no recourse to take it back.

ramesh31 4y ago

Everything is a lie. From the moment you pick up your phone (literally) everything you do is tracked. Every touch, every gesture, every tap, every app, even the temporal data of what you didn't do. It's all tracked by someone, somewhere, for something. And it's all discoverable under subpoena. The only solution is to return to monke. Live a completely analog or air-gapped lifestyle outside of what is required from you for work. I'm so sick of it. Fuck everything about participating in the surveillance state.

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

Carriers have been able to (at least roughly) determine your location for as long as there have been cell phones. This isn’t news.

LinuxBender 4y ago
Even before e911 was implemented on all the phones I could ping phones and give the FBI the approximate location and direction based on cell site handoffs. I had to use RF engineering maps that were overlaid on street maps but it worked. This was in 1997 on a GSM network.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  I’m aware of a court case almost a decade earlier where cell phone location information was introduced into evidence.
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    I believe it. Even on AMPS and D-AMPS one could still get approximate location. It just wouldn't be quite as accurate but if all you need is a neighborhood it could suffice.

korginator 4y ago

Your cell provider can always determine the location of your cellular device. They always have. Now with 4G and 5G it is easier for trusted services to get extremely precise details about the location of your device [1][2]. The example in the second link shows the details that the cellular network provider may have, and this includes the Cell tower ID, the enodeBID (4G), tracking area (TA) ID, geolocation, information about whether the device is moving (its velocity), the mobile country code (MCC), mobile network code (MNC), and a whole lot more. This data is already with your cellular network provider, so it makes no difference if you have "switched off" location services on your phone. [1] The Open5G Lab APIs https://swagger.open5glab.net/ https://swagger.open5glab.net/ [2] An example location tracking request https://swagger.open5glab.net/#/MonitoringEvent%20API%20Subscription%20level%20POST%20Operation/post__scsAsId__subscriptions https://swagger.open5glab.net/#/MonitoringEvent%20API%20Subs...

preordained 4y ago

If you ever believed such a thing for a moment, I have a bridge to sell you. A big one!

zbaxrl 4y ago

In 2009, a german politician got his location data from his carrier and made a visualization. https://web.archive.org/web/20150101020635/https://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention https://web.archive.org/web/20150101020635/https://www.zeit....

hnburnsy 4y ago

At least on an iPhone you can stop carrier location tracking by powering it off or removing the SIM car......oh crap!

hnburnsy 4y ago

Wait until the author hears about that power off switch onrecent iPhones!

dgivney 4y ago
OMG madness! What's next? A Turbo button that actually slows down the CPU!?
iJohnDoe 4y ago
Unless I misunderstood your comment - Find My iPhone still works when the iPhone is turned off. On new iPhones, it even says it on the screen that the iPhone is still findable when powered off. What might be interesting, you turn location services off in the settings while the iPhone is turned on. Then power off iPhone and effectively turn location services back on via Find My iPhone.

lm28469 4y ago

Isn't it obvious that it's a GPS switch, not a "I'm invisible" switch ? If you care about battery life you should keep it off unless you need directions anyways

XxCincinnatusxX 4y ago

https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2023/smartphones-popular-qualcomm-chip-secretly-share-private-information-us-chip-maker https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2023/smartphones-popular-qualc... I would think if the phones are doing this, there's no telling what else we don't know about them. I've decided now that it's pretty much "Game Over" when it comes to any privacy on a phone.

garyfirestorm 4y ago

I guess the question is - is there an open source software that forces the cellular modem to communicate only to one tower (of your choice)? this way, the exact location will never be known?

eimrine 4y ago
There is no FOSS in GSM/CDMA world, these technologies are closed as hell and there is no open information about the sim-card computers. Almost any old GSM phone (at least Siemens and Nokia) can chose towers voluntary - but in too developed countries having too small size on the globus everything pre-3G is disabled.

moremetadata 4y ago

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