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Isn’t this stuff fairly easy to circumvent as an individual by disabling location services on your phone? There’s still wifi positioning, but at least on iPhone
by kevinventullo 2y ago
Isn’t this stuff fairly easy to circumvent as an individual by disabling location services on your phone? There’s still wifi positioning, but at least on iPhone I think that’s opt in. That leaves cell tower triangulation which I believe is only good to within a mile or so, right?
I guess if you really don’t want to be found, put your phone on airplane mode or get a burner.
- flanbiscuit 2y agoA mile or so in a big congested city might make it difficult to find someone, but we're talking about spread out rural areas near the Texas/Mexico border where there are less people per square mile. But even the DFW area is huge and spread out. Maybe it's plausible?
- akira2501 2y agoWhat you really want is noise. You want your phone to generate a bunch of additional fake data. So much so that anyone who collects it will have no ability to tease out the real data from the fake data.
- maronato 2y agoWhen your phone downloads stuff, their servers can see your IP. While IPs may not give very specific locations by themselves, the fact that your IP may change as you move around helps a lot to narrow it down. Collect data for a few days to learn schedules, throw in some more specific data purchased from ISPs, other fingerprints, plot it on top of an actual map with roads and buildings, and you’ve got a very good guess of where specific people are, where they live and work, and how they move around. Correlate that with other people’s data and eventually you’ll be able to guess who they live and hang with.