Mobile carriers can get your GPS location
(an.dywa.ng)639 points by cbeuw 16 hours ago
639 points by cbeuw 16 hours ago
> We aren't going to remove the security state
We definitely won't get rid of it if we accept failure. I get that it seems extremely unlikely, but there's no use in trying to just mitigate the risk short term. One way or another that power will be abused eventually (if it isn't already).
Idealist views like this get us nowhere either tho.
The reality is somewhat more murky. On a long enough time horizon your point makes sense, we might be able to get rid of the security state by slowly chipping away at ig over hundreds or thousands of years.
Most of us are going to be dead in about 40 years tho. Security state isn't going anywhere in that timeframe.
>We aren't going to remove the security state.
We should make it impossible for the data to be obtained without express user agreement.
I turned off all cell carrier tracking 5 years ago. 100% of it.
By canceling my cell phone subscription.
I know I know, I must be amish, I have heard it all. But I run two tech companies, travel, have a family, and do most of the things most around here probably do other than doom scrolling.
So much more time in my own head to think.
Pardon my skepticism but I find it hard to believe you can actually participate in western society without choosing to have a government mandated tracking device?
Maybe you live somewhere this is possible but it's definitely not in the developed world
Runs 2 tech companies - the basic promise of the US is when you're rich you can do whatever the hell you want because you can pay people to handle stuff for you.
But also, one doesn't always need a phone - phones can die, signal is not gauranteed. What are your "must have" things that require one to have a smart phone to participate? Assume the poster has a home phone, laptop, and credit card.
Most 2FA can be done without a phone, and you can also use offline 2FA keys, not necessarily a text message.
You can also set up a phone number to accept texts from a laptop.
I can do whatever on my bank by just calling. It would be a bit weird to never be able to pitch in on meals with a $ transfer app, but I suppose when you run 2 tech companies you're probably paying most of the time, or you just take a note and transfer it later.
All 2FA options that require a phone like TOTP can be done just as easily on a laptop with a yubikey or nitrokey.
I have several business and personal bank accounts with two major banks. No Android or iOS needed.
Sure they push you hard to use them, but just say it is against your unspecified religion. They cannot make you use Android or iOS.
Traveling internationally or domestically, booking flights, hotels, going to concerts, theme parks, the movies, organizing hangouts with friends, exploring new locations... all of these things I do just fine by using a web browser on a desktop computer before I leave home, and sometimes printing a couple things. I live a typical middle class lifestyle just without the doom scrolling.
All the ways of living an active life engaged in the modern world that worked before the 2009 smartphone explosion still work just fine today. Just without tiktok and instagram. I think I am okay without those.
So what - printed maps? No ‘where are you?’ texts or the like? No looking up nearby anything you’re curious about but didn’t know about before hand?
Certainly possible, I guess, if everyone in your circle does the same, and has a ton of patience, and you spend a ton of extra time doing all the prep in advance. And don’t need to deal with things like traffic jams right now, or the like.
For consequences, we need to do away with the notion of qualified immunity. Why should police officers, politicians, agents of the government have any immunity for their actions? They should carry personal liability for breaking the law and violating others’ rights. Otherwise, there is no reason they’ll change. Right now, at best you’ll sue the government and get some money, but all you’re doing is punishing other tax payers.
It's the norm in most western countries. Prosecution of administration official is still rare, but nothing like the obvious free permit to misbehave we see in the US.
Get rid of qualified immunity and enjoy no more fruit of the poisonous tree. I assume you are not familiar with the laws of evidence by your emotional position. One of the biggest problems the country faces is citizen literacy in all domains. If you improve citizen literacy across all domains you will solve all problems, until they take away our ability to vote. The "system" exploits those who cannot defend themselves.
In the United States, qualified immunity is a legal principle of federal law that grants government officials performing discretionary (optional) functions immunity from lawsuits for damages unless the plaintiff shows that the official violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known".
Under 42 USC § 1983, a plaintiff can sue for damages when state officials violate their constitutional rights or other federal rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
Qualified Immunity only sets the bar or threshold that you have to meet in order to sue.
But for federal officials, individuals don’t have standing right?
It's more like when the federal government passed a law giving people a recourse for when state officials violate their rights they did not write the law to (or purposefully wrote it to not) include the federal government.
> We aren't going to remove the security state
What security state? They aren't doing this for anyone's safety. This is the surveillance and parallel construction state.
> What needs to happen is accountability.
No agency can have this power and remain accountable. Warrants are not an effective tool for managing this. Courts cannot effectively perform oversight after the fact.
> The only way to stop the rampant abuse is to treat data like fire.
You've missed the obvious. You should really go the other direction. Our devices should generate _noise_. Huge crazy amounts of noise. Extraneous data to a level that pollutes the system beyond any utility. They accept all this data without filtering. They should suffer for that choice.
> They aren't doing this for anyone's safety.
Strictly speaking, this is not completely true. When you call an emergency number, it’s very good that they can see exactly where you are. That was how this was sold 15+ years ago. But of course, that’s basically the only use case when this should be available.
Yet when I call emergency I must provide my location verbally, and then am usually contacted for a follow-up, because the guys cannot find the place. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that this location technology works perfectly well: just not for the "only use case when this should be available".
Except apparently they can't. I'm in L.A., a city where resources presumably represent what's available in modern cities, and the first thing I've been asked in any 911 call is "what's your location?"
This is particularly offensive considering that everyone was forced to replace his phone in the early 2000s to comply with "E-911." Verizon refused to let me activate a StarTAC I bought to replace my original, months before this mandate actually took effect.
Looking back on it, it was a perfect scam: Congress got paid off to throw a huge bone to everyone except the consumers. We were all forced to buy new phones, and for millions of people that meant renewing service contracts. Telcos win. Phone manufacturers win. Consumers lose.
Should it not be available with a valid court order as well?
> Our devices should generate _noise_. Huge crazy amounts of noise. Extraneous data to a level that pollutes the system beyond any utility. They accept all this data without filtering. They should suffer for that choice.
I like the idea on principle, but I'll like it far less when I'm getting charged with computer fraud or some other over-reaching bullshit law.
You people are so cynical.
Its simply made for 911 calls.
In the 2G era there was no compute space to just put in extra evil shit for fun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_resource_location_servic...
This line of argument is common. We use the term 'wiretap' because that is what it was, a physical tap on a physical wire and it took a real person there to do it. Even then it took a warrant to approve it. Wiretap laws were written when the technology made abuse extremely hard and were likely appropriate for the time. Now we live in an age where abuse of millions can be done in a single key-stroke and often doesn't require a warrant or oversight of any kind because the technology has changed and evolved to provide loopholes around the laws. The intent was emergency services but the mass use has been anything but. That is the key point and those that have abused this, weather on behalf of the government or for corporate profit, should be held responsible. We should have laws that criminalize breaking the intent of use in ways that harm individuals. You found a technical system rife for abuse and you use it that way? Go to jail. Pay a fine. It is that simple.
Made for, and used for, are two different things. The article gives an example of Israel slurping down that data constantly to track everyone, and you can bet they aren't the only ones doing that.
Does it apply to the government like it applies to people? Is it enforced against governments like it is enforced against people and corporations? A core issue here is that laws, and the application and enforcement of laws, generally do not. Having said that I applaud the attempt and encourage pushing forward on the anti-surveillance aspects of GDPR while recognizing all laws are flawed.
Yeah it applies to government like local municipalities have to adhere to GDPR, they cannot just have your name on the register, they have to have a legal reason.
Way you could argue it doesn’t apply to government is that the government makes the law so they can make the law that makes data processing and having your name on some kind of registry required.
But still they have to show you the reason and you can escalate to EU bodies to fine your own country if they don’t follow the rules.
I guess. In Poland when I go to gov offices I need to sign 25 GDPR clauses
This right is applied per entity.
If I send it to the company A, company B doesn't execute it unless they're a subsidiary of A (or A is their data controller) and my request was carefully crafted.
In the scenario you painted, that would mean that my _former_ friend has issued their request to me.
In that case? Fair. Poof if that's their wish.
Otherwise? How do you imagine it work?
This community should be talking about meshcore more imho.
It's a peer to peer network based on Lora. It really only allows text messaging but with up to 20km hops between peers coverage is surprisingly huge. Incredibly useful if you go hiking with friends (if you get split up you can still stay in touch).
See https://eastmesh.au/ and scroll down to the map for the Victoria and now more widely Australia network that's sprung up.
Reticulum gets around a lot of these problems, as the (better) encryption is app-level (or even more fine-grained.) Its also not tied to lora, so you can interop easily with other transports. I made a websocket transport for it, and there is already TCP and UDP, and a couple non-lora radio transports. I also made a (works on web) js and Arduino client lib, and it has a few native client libs, so it can sort of be used on anything, even over traditional networks, or web clients. Meshcore and meshtastic are way more popular, but reticulum seems so much better, to me, for most things. It can still have overload problems, like any radio network, but no client is required to forward, so you can build a different kind of network ("only forward messages that are for my peeps" and marked correctly.) It also has "it costs compute PoW to send to me" which can greatly cut down on spam.
I only recently discovered Reticulum, only to then learn that the developer has retired from working on it. Do you know if there's still any community members carrying the torch?
The discord is still very active, and there are still commits from original developer, so I am not sure. Its a simple enough protocol, though, and it's been reimplemented a few times. I made my own no-class python version, js, C, etc. Someone made a rust version.
Great for small networks. Once bad actors find it, it will be attacked. See gnutella as the case study on unsupervised peer to peer networks
I really want to get into these Lora based mesh tools but the range in my experience is terrible. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, maybe it's a lack of nodes in my area.
I just tested the other day. I'm in the midwest US so it's winter, no leaves. I managed to get about a quarter mile before my two portable nodes couldn't talk to each other. T-Echo with muziworks whip antenna.
Without a bunch of solidly placed, high elevation, high gain antenna nodes, this just isn't really that usable.
Plus, all the other issues others have highlighted.
Height is might.
I couldn't get ANYTHING on my first/test ESP32 (Heltec v2).
Anything. I didn't see any packets. Then I finally heard one station later when I held it high on the upper floor.
The I hanged it at the top of my roof and I currently have almost 130 repeaters and room servers.
In your scenario a couple of 5W handhelds woukd work better.
But I agree the usabity is very limited. This is why I think of hanging a couple of guerilla solar repeaters in my neighborhood :)
This isn't great advice if it's supposed to be an alternative to text messaging with a carrier (especially if you're using encrypted RCS).
For one, meshcore doesn't do a fantastic job of protecting metadata. Advertisements include your public key, and if I'm reading this[0] right, your GPS coordinates.
Second, the default public channel uses effectively no encryption at all.
Moreover, the network doesn't exhaustively prevent someone who intercepts a packet from identifying who sent it. It's no Signal.
[0] https://deepwiki.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/7.1-packet-struct...
All telemetry is off by default, you have to explicitly tune it on and then optionally permit specific contacts to poll it.
The PKI is basic because these networks are tiny and merging. And running on tiny computers ($5 boards with no display)
Public channel is public and it uses the default encryption key because it's a default channel, so by definition everyone is invited to participate. Not sure what your critique is.
And no, it's not trying to be signal. It's also currently less reliable.
But it's still safer than Sms, by a country mile.
It's bad advice because:
1. Telling someone to use one of these devices because their phone carrier might look up their location is silly in the first place, because meshcore doesn't even eliminate the possibility of being tracked geographically.
2. It protects your messages better than SMS but if you care about the privacy of your messages, it's infinitely worse advice than suggesting someone use Signal or another app that actually replaces SMS securely.
Still falls flat when it comes to metadata privacy. Just having multiple nodes distributed geographically that listen for packets would give you the ability to narrow down the location of a specific identity dramatically, even if you're not in range of their device.
Meshcore and -tastic have the huge problem that the encryption keys are bound to the device and not the app.
I've been using the T-Deck Pro and T-Lora Pager, so the device is the app.
I agree, there's way too much going on in the firmware, just make a dumb Lora-bluetooth bridge. Hell, just integrate a Lora radio in a phone.
How trivial is it, really? These are spread spectrum devices that could have very sparse duty cycles. If you sending only millisecond bursts a couple of times an hour, for telemetry and whatnot, it would seem pretty hard to get a good fix, especially when moving. I haven't analyzed lora traffic, so just talking out of my ass.
You could get a rough location for free. Every time you send a message, “observer” nodes connected to the internet publish the packet, and in the packet is the repeater path taken, repeaters have known locations and the first repeater is going to be near you.
If its meshtastic, just keep sending traceroutes until you triangulate the node.
The crypto is bad and the networks are extremely low bandwidth and quite unreliable and are vulnerable to jamming or spam/overload.
I’ve deployed lots of nodes, and the technology reminds me of ipfs: people who don’t use it much vastly oversell its capabilities.
Meshcore isn't, the firmwares are proprietary. Meshtastic is, but they whine about trademark stuff all the time and cry when anyone mentions Meshcore in their channels. LoRa radios themselves are all proprietary Semtech turf. I guess it's possible to run over 2.4ghz but the range predictably sucks compared to 900mhz.
Meshcore is open source. It’s « some » of the apps that are not.
If you go hiking with a bunch of people into the backcountry, you don't want to rely on the cellular network.
Handheld radios, meshtatic (not meshcore), and in 5 minutes you're set up and good to depart. Or ideally inreach indeed.
Meshtastic has terrible defaults (every node rebroadcasts everything, every node sends telemetry), which makes sense in the backwoods but not anywhere close to civilisation.
This, combined with the 10% duty cycle limitation on the used frequencies is the main issue, I believe. Once the 10% are used up, a node basically has to go dead until it falls below 10% again. And with lots of messages about battery levels and other telemetry being sent and relayed, those 10% get used up fast.
> This community should be talking about meshcore more imho.
The fundamental problem of distributed networks is that you can either have centralized control of the endpoints, or your network becomes vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks. So meshcore/meshtastic are great because they are used only by well-meaning people. If they become more popular, we'll start getting tons of spam :(
I mean we kinda did when we decided that emergency services calls would be special and give first responders the ability to find you. Wireless carriers are required to provide GPS quality (actually better than GPS) location data to EMS and this is how they built it.
The only way to actually do this was develop a way to ask the phone because the tower isn't accurate enough. In the US it could have been more privacy preserving by being push but I imagine carriers don't want to maintain and update a list of current emergency numbers. "Sorry person in a car crash, we can't find you because cellular modem firmware is out of date and your emergency number isn't on list" is a PR disaster waiting to happen. Easier to coordinate with police and fire and let them do the asking.
euhm, well. 112 programmer here. There are multiple levels. Cell tower triangulation come in automatically from providers. But they are only in tower numbers. They might be wrongly entered by engineers, hence the confirming question about where you are. Second is subscription information, as in registered address. Chances are if called from nearby your address, you are at your address. Next is a text to your phone number, which is intercepted by firmware and sends gps coords back. This can be turned off, since implementation.
American carriers have a different protocol than the EU. The EU (and probably EU derived networks) uses a """secret""" SMS format that's opt-in, but the 911 system works differently.
The 911 feature can be activated fully remotely, the 112 feature is supposed to only activate when dialing an emergency number.
The US one is called E911: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_911
Did you read the article or are you merely responding to the title? The article begins by acknowledging triangulation and then moving on to the point of the article. The article is about commands built into the UMTS and LTE specs for requesting GPS from the device. Your comment seems to be about everything but the main point of the article.
Yes I saw that and also took it to mean the person didn't read the article. A text to your phone number? The article never mentions SMS. Heck I think the 2g/3g "feature" does not even require the phone to even have a SIM installed. This next sentence also seems to have been written without reading the article: "This can be turned off, since implementation."
I believe they're talking about this feature (https://support.google.com/android/answer/9319337?sjid=18079...).
This is a system you can disable as a user, but it's not the on-modem feature discussed in the article.
Note sure: In my country exactly this feature is used by police & state enforcement to find locatin, because this "ping" message is not forwarded from the modem to the OS, so the OS is not aware of any of these messages
yeah, there always was. It's a service code, like getting your imei. But it was a weird long one, and manufacturer dependent. Now UI switches are created for it apparantly. Can't find it anywhere on the internet though. I don't work there anymore, so can't look it up.
I thought one of the selling points of 3g was gps like precision in dense urban areas where gps signals would bounce too much for precise location and therefore mobile carriers didn’t need to ask for gps.
With that being said, my 10th floor apartment has a 5g radio installed by one of the major carriers and I am still placed one block wrong when looking on Google Maps.
I worked in telecoms back then, and I don’t recall 3G having any precise location mechanism. Most handsets back then did not have GPS receivers, and as such they could only tell you a pretty rough estimate of your position, based on multiteration from nearby cell towers. The best I could get was within a couple of hundred meters in an urban area.
4G (LTE) networks had more cell sites so could give better precision multilateration, but by then smartphones were taking over the market and they usually had GPS receivers.
What you need iPhone Air, iPhone 16e, or iPad Pro (M5) Wi-Fi + Cellular iOS 26.3 or later
A supported carrier: Germany: Telekom United Kingdom: EE, BT United States: Boost Mobile Thailand: AIS, True
Turn limit precise location on or off
Open Settings, then tap Cellular.
Tap Cellular Data Options.
If you have more than one phone number under SIMs, tap one of your lines.
Scroll down to Limit Precise Location.
Turn the setting on or off. You might be prompted to restart your device.
Apple doc: https://support.apple.com/en-us/126101
Only Boost Mobile in the U.S. Weird. About 7.5M subscribers. Maybe it requires 5G? Wonder if it works when roaming?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boost_Mobile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operato...
AFAIK, other than maybe some 5G, Boost Mobile just resells service from AT&T.
Boost Mobile (under Dish Network), until a few months ago, ran their own custom-built 5G network that covered about 30% of the US population. They built it after the acquisition of Sprint by T-Mobile, in an effort to maintain a fourth nationwide wireless carrier.
Unfortunately Boost/Dish struggled significantly with finances and customer attraction post COVID, largely due to two problems (seamless roaming between their own network and partners’, and more importantly, getting manufacturers like Apple to build compatible phones). When the current president came into the picture, the FCC essentially forced the sale of Dish’s primary spectrum licenses to administration-friendly SpaceX, for future Starlink use.
As of now, they are in the process of moving their customers to AT&T (and possibly a secondary agreement with T-Mobile), but they seem to be maintaining their own network core - that’s likely why they’re able to implement support for this, while AT&T does not.
Kinda funny that the most secure phone setup in the US is an iPhone Air on Boost Mobile. Who could have predicted that!
It isn’t restricted to Boost Mobile. It is only available on devices with the C1 or C1X modem, though. I assume this is because of specifics with the third party modems that most models in the wild have vs what Apple is doing in-house with their C1(X). If you call emergency services it will still provide precise location.
It is restricted to Boost Mobile in addition to using the C1(X), at least for the purposes of this beta version.
Serious question: will this limit the ability of 911 emergency services to help you?
I can imagine a scenario where emergency servies are authorized to send the ping to get your precise location and if you disable this, you may regret it. And a major feature of some phones/watches is the ability to automatically call 911 under certain fall/crash movement detection, where you might not have the ability to re-enable your GPS location.
The feature says it doesn't restrict the ability of 911 to locate you...
But they still can track the cellular connection and do triangulation from that, no?
Basically, if you have any cell phone the government can track you. Buying a burner phone with cash (via strawman proxy) seems like the only way to temporarily obscure your location.
I imagine with the ubiquity of cameras in the commons and facial recognition and gait analysis they can knit that up even more.
From the comments, it appears many are not aware that even the US government buys location data of users from data brokers - How the Federal Government Buys Our Cell Phone Location Data - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/how-federal-government... ... Apparently, US cell phone companies are one of the providers of this data - US cell carriers are selling access to your real-time phone location data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684 ...
We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do. Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.
But we want to support privatization at all cost, even when privatization these days has significant influence on our daily lives, akin to the concerns we had when we placed restrictions on government. Seems like we need to start regulating private actions a bit more, especially when private entities accumulate enough wealth they can act like multi state governments in levels of influence. That’s my opinion, at least.
> We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do.
Thats basically the foundational idealogy of the united states. Thats not the issue.
The real issue is your next sentence. The government can just loophole around their intentional limitations by paying private companies to work on their behalf.
I'm aware it's intentional on the government's end. My point is it is not intentional by the original intentions, and should be a priority for people to advocate to fix.
> allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do. Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes. <
Somehow this reminds me about Blackwater / Xe Technologies? :-/
(Im betting 100 USD that soon we will find out that ICE also deployed "private financed forces" to "support state actions"?)
>> allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do.
>Somehow this reminds me about Blackwater / Xe Technologies? :-/
Is there some context I'm missing? Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_(company) it shows they might have perpetrated some war crimes, but that alone doesn't really make them worse than the US military. For instance, consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstri....
>We really have a societal problem in that we allow private entities to do things we don’t allow government to do.
It really isn't, given that the government literally has a monopoly on violence, and therefore it makes sense to have more guardrails for it. That's not to say private entities should have free reign to do whatever it wants, but the argument of "private entities can do [thing] that governments can't, so we should ban private entities too!" is at best incomplete.
>Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.
Again, this is at best an incomplete argument. The government can't extract a confession out of you (5th amendment). It can however, interview your drinking buddies that you blabbed your latest criminal escapades to. Is that the government "bypassing" the 5th amendment? Arguably. Is that something bad and we should ban? Hardly.
This is why I advocate for making selling location/identifying data illegal. If nobody is allowed to sell it then the government cannot legally buy it.
I agree completely with your first paragraph, but I'm not sure what privatization has to do with it. Also, I agree that more regulation of private parties is needed. Or even better, break up the private companies that are like multi-state governments in terms of power.
Why not vote for some law limiting the government’s buying of this data? After all, I expect a say in how the government is run, so that seems like the appropriate path. I don’t see why I should expect a say in how AT&T is run. AT&T can’t raise an army, or enter my house, or shoot me.
In some states you do.
https://ballotpedia.org/States_with_initiative_or_referendum
You didn't purchase your lawmakers, the companies profiting from the bad laws did.
This is why they get their laws passed.
Someone should start selling hardware (phones, laptops) for which it can be proved it doesn't spy on users, doesn't have backdoors and can't be exploited to leak information.
Until then, we must assume that using anything connected implies risks.
I'll ask people, because I'm in the right circles. I want to know where it works. I've been VERY clear in my messaging to HN (on the RCS issue and having ear blown out by iPhone last week) that I am not going to glaze Apple even if the new modems they built interest me. They are usually sort of a neutral to me that has me more pissed off in the recent months than usual. Maybe send me one of your new devices if you don't want me pissed off anymore.
As for this location stuff, I'm curious though into how this works and how Apple (and BOOST/DISH) somehow prevent it happening when the big 3 in the US don't. We all know Apple would have complete control over the modem they designed, that's not a surprise. T-Mobile at least it's possible to stay NR-SA connected, it's apparently not a feature limited to SA like resistance to IMSI catchers are. Is this an OpenRAN feature, which Boost uses?
At least in the past, towers had a piece of equipment called a LMU that is sometimes installed separately from the radio equipment and it's used for measuring the timing advance to triangulate where a device may be for 911. Here's a reddit thread I started years ago for a KML of all the T-Mobile LMU installs in the NYC market: https://www.reddit.com/r/cellmapper/comments/hq2h7u/kml_of_a... (I just found it leaked, it's not online anymore probably). An FCC doc on LMU's: https://transition.fcc.gov/pshs/services/911-services/enhanc... (this is all old tech now, we're doing LTE/NR now in 99.9% of circumstances in the US)
If you're worried about your position being exposed, don't carry a mobile phone, or any "connected" device for that matter - including wifi
NB: same applies for NB-IOT. NBB: this has actually SAVED lives source: I use to work as a core network archictect for tier1 carriers
What if I told you that carriers can also activate your phone's microphone without your knowledge and listen in on your surroundings?
What if I told you there are phones out there with hardware kill switches to physically cut power to microphones, cameras, and GPS?
"Mobile phone (cell phone) microphones can be activated remotely, without any need for physical access"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_listening_device#Remote...
And the linked sources are:
- Kröger, Jacob Leon; Raschke, Philip (2019). "Is My Phone Listening in? On the Feasibility and Detectability of Mobile Eavesdropping". Data and Applications Security and Privacy XXXIII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 11559. pp. 102–120. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-22479-0_6. ISBN 978-3-030-22478-3. ISSN 0302-9743.
- Schneier, Bruce (5 December 2006). "Remotely Eavesdropping on Cell Phone Microphones". Schneier On Security. Archived from the original on 12 January 2014. Retrieved 13 December 2009.
- McCullagh, Declan; Anne Broache (1 December 2006). "FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool". CNet News. Archived from the original on 10 November 2013. Retrieved 14 March 2009.
- Odell, Mark (1 August 2005). "Use of mobile helped police keep tabs on suspect". Financial Times. Retrieved 14 March 2009.
- "Telephones". Western Regional Security Office (NOAA official site). 2001. Archived from the original on 6 November 2013. Retrieved 22 March 2009.
- "Can You Hear Me Now?". ABC News: The Blotter. Archived from the original on 25 August 2011. Retrieved 13 December 2009.
- Lewis Page (26 June 2007). "Cell hack geek stalks pretty blonde shocker". The Register. Archived from the original on 3 November 2013. Retrieved 1 May 2010.
So specific models from before secure operating systems like Android and iOS. Now those operating systems even show an indicator whenever they are recording.
How that works is simple: there are regulations that force that the microphone used for calling is directly connected to the "baseband", which is under control of the carrier. It has to be, because of AT&T's argument: ONE misbehaving baseband can make cell phones inoperable in an area that's up to a kilometer in diameter. So AT&T's cell towers "need" to be able to send out a signal that permanently disables a phone's transmitter.
Regulations say the baseband MUST control: all wireless signals (including wifi and GPS), all microphones and speakers, and it must be able to disable the camera electrically. It must have a tamper-resistant identifier (IMEI number ... kind of).
Oh, it must allow calling the emergency services. If in this mode, during a call to the emergency services it MUST be able to send the exact GPS position (not just once, continuously) to the emergency services at the request of the emergency services (ie. NOT the user, and carriers must facilitate this)
By the way, it's worse: as you might guess from the purpose, it doesn't matter if your phone is on the "spying" carrier or not, other carriers can send commands to other carriers' phones' basebands (because "get off this frequency" is required: spectrum is shared, even within countries. Since phones may go from one tower to another and be required to vacate frequencies, you need this command). It doesn't even matter if you have a SIM in your phone or not (ever tought that if eSIM works, it must of course be possible for any provider to contact and send instructions to the phone, so it opens up an end-to-end encrypted connection to the javacard that the actual phone cpu cannot intercept). In some phones it doesn't even matter if the phone is on or not (though of course eventually it dies). So "meshtastic" or anything else cannot make a phone safe.
And in practice it's even worse. A lot of phone manufacturers "save on memory" and use the same memory chips for the baseband processor and the central cpu. Which means that it's a little bit cheaper ... and the baseband has access to all the phone memory and all peripherals connected through the memory bus (which is all of them in any recent phone). It may even be the case that these chips are integrated in the cpu (which I believe is the case for recent Apple chips). Oh and the regulations say: if there's a conflict over control over (most) peripherals, including the microphone and speaker, the baseband processor MUST be guaranteed to win that fight.
Oh and because governments demand this, but of course neither fund nor test these devices, they are old, bug-ridden and very insecure. This also means that despite the government requiring that these features be built into phones, governments, carriers and police forces generally do not have the equipment required to actually use these features (though I'm sure the CIA has implement them all). Not even carriers' cell phone towers: they have to pay extra to allow even just frequency sharing ...
Here is an article about baseband and baseband processors.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/170874-the-secret-seco...
>Regulations say the baseband MUST control: [...] all microphones and speakers
I'm going to need a specific citation for this, given that it seems trivially falsifiable by the existence of bluetooth headphones (which the baseband obviously can't control), not to mention other sorts of call forwarding features like the one iPhones have.
> Regulations say the baseband MUST control: all wireless signals (including wifi and GPS), all microphones and speakers, and it must be able to disable the camera electrically. It must have a tamper-resistant identifier (IMEI number ... kind of).
This is simply not true.
Source: I own a phone where this is not the case. Many Linux phones internally attach their wireless devices via USB, so there is good separation.
Also many upscale phones have decoupled the baseband from things that were once connected to it, as an attempt to improve security. (On iOS for instance the main CPU controls wifi.)
Please provide links to the relevant regulations from an actual government website such as eCFR in the US (https://www.ecfr.gov/)
The regulation would likely come from an industry body like the GSM alliance or some other thing that gates certification without which carriers won't allow the phone model onto their network, not governments.
I wouldn’t be so confident. The article even references this. Apple has used third-party baseband devices in the iPhone since the beginning, which was from other manufacturers. All bets are off regarding security when this is the case. This does included microphone access.
The article touches on this by saying Apple is making the baseband/modem hardware now. Something they should have done since day one, and I’m not sure what took them so long. However, it was was clear they didn’t have the expertise in this area and it was easier to just uses someone else’s.
Yeah but also RF in the real world is hard.
Apple found out the hard way with the iPhone 4. Their secrecy didn't help. People doing real world testing had a case that made it look like an iPhone 3s and that also happened to mitigate the death grip problem. We know this because one was stolen and given to gizmodo.
And that was even only antenna design, they still used a standard RF stack then.
I empathize with the sentiment, but in reality Apple is as lazy as anyone else: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/07/29/134008/apple-con...
Apple is not as lazy as anyone else, don't believe the hype.
That assertion is a bit overblown. And people can easily find out it's overblown with a bit of research.
But at the same time, my whole philosophy is never let it touch any network connected device at all if it is critical. I don't care if it's an Apple device.
Here's reality, mobile carriers have been able to get your location from nearly the inception of mass market mobile phone use. I'm not sure anyone really believed their location was somehow secret and not discoverable. If you're using the phone or internet networks, you're not anonymous. Full stop.
Forget whatever anyone told you about your VPN, or whatever other anonymization/privacy machine that Mr McBean is selling Sneetches these days. Assume everyone is tracked, and some are even watched. Therefore everything you do or say with your devices should be considered content that is posted publicly with an uncertain release date.
There is a pretty large chasm between "When you explicit (or accidentally) use the siri functionality, it can record the interaction for quality purposes and per the agreement you made share that will Apple or its agents" and "random third parties can engage hardware functionality without your knowledge and spy on you".
I am entirely, 100% certain that my telco can't just enable the microphone on my iPhone and record me, short of some 0-day exploit. I simply cannot make that bet on many other devices.
Eh, no? How does your provider know all your bank accounts? If at all, then the one you are using for billing - but the 2FA apps do not expose such data to the provider? The Apps communicate via HTTPS calls in the background?
GrapheneOS only supports devices with isolated radios including but not limited to cellular. It's one of the hardware requirements:
https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
The radios on the supported devices can't access the microphone, GNSS, etc.
GrapheneOS has never supported a device without an isolated cellular radio since that isolation was in place even with the initial Nexus 5 and Galaxy S4. However, some of the devices prior to Pixels did have Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth without proper isolation similar to laptops/desktops. Nexus 5X was the initial device with proper isolation for Wi-Fi/Bluetooth due to having SoC provided Wi-Fi from Qualcomm. Pixels have avoided this issue for integrating Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth. Nexus devices left this up to companies like LG, Huawei, etc. and anything not done for them by Qualcomm tended to have security neglected. Qualcomm has taken security a lot more seriously than other SoC vendors and typical Android OEMs for a long time and provides good isolation for most of the SoC components.
Don't believe everything you read about smartphone security and especially cellular radios. There are many products with far less secure cellular radios which are far less isolated but rather connected via extremely high attack surface approaches including USB which are claiming those are better. A lot of the misconceptions about cellular come from how companies market supposedly more secure products which are in reality far worse than an iPhone.
I cannot imagine a way to connect a cellular modem that provides a smaller surface area than USB ACM. There is no direct memory access and no way for the modem to directly access other devices.
Could you perhaps elaborate on what the more-secure alternative to USB ACM would be?
Nothing can stop the tower equipment manufacturer like Ericsson from knowing the location of your phone and cooperating with advertising or mobile tracking compainies to aggregate that data in useful ways. If you have a phone, people that want your location have it and there is nothing you can do.
False. You can:
1) Leave the phone at home
2) Use a phone with a hardware toggle switch that physically kills power to the cell modem, or turn off the phone and put it in a tested Faraday bag
3) Conspire with other citizens to make such location tracking illegal and to enforce that law
I’m tired of privacy doomerism. You have options, use them.
Not all the time, no. But I can make calls over wifi and forward texts to myself. And nobody’s tracking me. Why would I always need the phone with me?
>> Nothing can stop the tower equipment manufacturer like Ericsson from knowing the location of your phone
> False. You can: > 1) Leave the phone at home
If you're going to be pedantic, at least be pedantically correct. The tower (and carrier) would still know the location of your phone in that case. (It just wouldn't be with you.)
So... Ericsson has a backdoor into every RAN and Core equipment they sell?
Emergency services (with the proper software) have been able to get your precise location from your phone for a while now.
This isn’t a new capability and shouldn’t be surprising.
I think this feature is required for emergency calls if your specific carrier is not available/in reach - in emergency mode after the phone is restarted, it does connect to any carrier when calling 911, not only yours?
What is it’s a mentally ill person who is about to kill themself?
That’s the majority of uses for the system in the UK. People love to run away and waste police time.
You know about it because your regulatory body requires the system exist.
And it’s typically disclosed in one way or another.
Between buying a phone and reading the OS EULA to providing an E911 address to my carrier, I can count at least three disclosures of this feature.
Nothing is secret or magic here.
I spent ~5 years volunteering for a search and rescue team in New Mexico.
We definitely got the cellphone tower triangulation data. I never once saw GNSS data provided by a carrier. We used FindMeSAR https://findmesar.com/, the subject would usually text back the coordinates from the phone.
Just one data point.
The revolution that's occurred since my SAR volunteer days is the wide availability of satellite messenging on consumer phones. I'm guessing that's really changed the situation quite a bit.
Surely that only happens when the phone user dials 911 ?
The cell network routinely does TDoA triangulation in order to help choose which tower should serve the client mobile device. Accuracy is about 20m, and may be better at 5G frequencies. 911 gets the location from the mobile network provider, but the network provider could provide it to anyone, and they do.
Tons of "free" and crapware apps are also recording location, and sending it to data brokers.
https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-...
Using LTE Timing Advance feature, especially on 5G, accuracy can be much higher.
https://5g-tools.com/5g-nr-timing-advance-ta-distance-calcul... shows an example of the parameters necessary. I don't think you can get your smartphone to dump those stats for you, but the granularity of the individual distance measurement is in the tens of centimeters.
Of course this strongly depends on cell infrastructure being placed precisely, continuously updating correction factors, and a bunch of antennae being around the target to get measurements for, but in most cities that isn't much of a challenge if the operator is working together with whoever wants to spy on citizens.
You're thinking of Phase II E911 in the US.
That's true, but you can always be triangulated down a couple hundred meters by figuring out which towers you're connected to.
Phone detects that you call emergency service and enables gps.
Last time I called 911 (well, it's 112 in my country) my android phone asked if I want to provide gps coordinates. I did, but they still asked for address, so probably this is not integrated/used everywhere.
The phone could literally pop up a consent alert asking whether to respond to a GPS ping request from the carrier. Or just not honor the pings at all unless you dialed 911 within the last hour.
This is a specific service inside the phone that looks for messages from the carrier requesting a GPS position, it could just refuse, or lie. It's not the same as cell tower triangulation.
Carrier* Android and iOS both integrate with RapidSOS UNITE. RapidSOS then processes the rich emergency information from the user's device (enhanced location, videos and photos, etc), and is available to the 911 dispatcher in their dispatch software. 99.99% of Americans are covered by RapidSOS integrations in their municipalities.
https://rapidsos.com/public-safety/unite/
When the call comes in they can click a button and query RapidSOS for current 911 calls for that number and pull the information inwards.
https://www.baycominc.com/hubfs/2025%20Website%20Update/Prod...
In the UK, it happens when you call 999 or 112. I don't think 911 is supported, although it probably should be (it'd be a mess to get everyone to agree to add it to their routing tables, but I bet there's a nonzero proportion of people who watch American TV programmes and think the emergency number is 911 - or, for that matter, American tourists).
When you dial 999 it forwards your phone's GPS location if it has a lock to the provider, who then forwards it on to one of the 999 call handling centres in the UK, who then in turn forward that on to the appropriate emergency service control room. All the various services use various different products for telephony and dispatch but they will show the incoming location, and often will prepopulate an incident with the location.
The system that does this is called "EISEC" - Enhanced Information Service for Emergency Calls - and has a lot of cool stuff defined in the spec (which is publically available! You can just go and read it! BT offer a "Supplier's Information Note" with the protocol and details of how the information is encoded) that also handles calls from landlines. These are easy - your telephone provider knows where you live. OMG! The phone company know where I live? Yes, dumbass, they pulled a wire right into your house, of course they know where it is. For VoIP the situation is a little different but you can notify your VoIP provider of the location that the number is being used at, and it'll inject that into the EISEC request.
You can do other cool stuff like if you've got fixed mobile telephone in a vehicle, you can assign the make, model, registration number, colour, and so on in the EISEC database, so given a call from a phone number they know what car they're looking for. No-one uses this.
The very great majority of calls coming in to 999 are from mobiles. It's extremely rare to get one from a landline.
None of the providers use triangulation for determining where a phone is, it's all GPS.
While it's a legit metadata privacy vulnerability, it doesn't close a much bigger hole that already exists. (Close it, if you can, of course.)
Almost every carrier can triangulate a handset in an area with multiple towers without help of the handset using relative signal strength to each seen towers and data processing. This is how most police in most jurisdictions are able to find an active handset within ~100m given only a phone number. Don't think carriers in some countries aren't constantly logging that approximate and precise queried location metadata and selling it to data brokers.
The only method to prevent continuously location tracking is to disconnect a handset from the cellular network by attenuating the signal with a blocking bag, antenna disconnection, or real power off. The lack cellular network connectivity may be extremely inconvenient by defeating the purpose of a phone. There are situations where someone doesn't want to power down their phone but does want to be RF clean where a Faraday bag would be a good idea(tm).
911 Product guy here...
TL;DR, this is nothing new.
Carriers have offered location of your device for 911 calls for years now, through a set of metadata called Automatic Location Identification (ALI).
This is only provided to 911 (police & fire) by carriers alongside your 911 call.
Mobile Device Manufacturers can also provide "precise location" to 911 for the same calls, but that's a separate form of data and closely secured.
Bottom line - Carrier data has always been less precise, but more readily available. Device data (i.e. Apple and Google) is more precise, but harder to access.
I don't believe there is a way to intentionally break this system, nor to detect with 100% certainty that it's happening.
You'd need to run an open source baseband modem with settings and logs in all the right places. I don't think those exist.
Someone might be able to exploit the Linux kernel running on Qualcomm modems and build a tool for rooted Android phones after reverse engineering the baseband, but I imagine a lot of copyright lawyers and probably law enforcement people will send you very scary letters if you document remote location tracking features like these.
Also, if you have any 4G or 5G modem, your carrier already has a pretty good idea where you are. They probably log your location too. The advanced precision and timing information necessary for high speed cellular broadband is enough to get a decent location log. That also includes other connected devices such as cars, of course.
I think the GPS antenna is either omnidirectional or very nearly so., since my phone can get location in many orientations.
So I don't think a single foil sticker would make much difference.
I've noticed that when I travel, I get spam calls from the area code I am visiting. I have asked my cell provider if they monetize my location data, and they swear they aren't. But I don't trust them, given that no one else (other than Apple) would know where I am in real time. Recently switched providers and haven't experienced it since then. Wouldn't be surprised if there was a class action lawsuit someday.
Of course, this doesn't require having GPS location, just cell tower info is enough.
> But I don't trust them, given that no one else (other than Apple) would know where I am in real time.
Literally every website and app you use with any kind of shared analytics/ads gets your general location just from your IP address alone, and can update your profile on that analytics/ads provider.
It is far more likely this, than your cell phone provider.
The ads/analytics providers very well might. They gather data and cross-reference from tons of different sources.
And I don't know about you, but I've put my phone number into a lot of apps and sites. Sometimes it's required, sometimes it's for 2FA, etc.
I'd be looking at ad networks rather than telcos in this case. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/google-settlement-may-...
Yeah it's a possibility if they matched up ad stuff with my home location and guessed at my phone number based on that.
But if they're trying to get me to answer the phone, calling from a local number actually makes me less likely to answer. Nobody would be calling my cell phone from the city I'm visiting. I'm more likely to pick up a call if the area code is from back home.
GPS on my old Android takes a minute or two to get a fix every time I turn it on, and I very rarely have GPS on at the same time as the cell radio, so I doubt they're getting more than triangulation from me.
My guess is that this data is actually used for network analytics by the carriers and to determine if the device connecting to the tower should switch to another one.
This data is vital for a mobile carrier to make sure to have a good signal coverage under all the possible conditions.
It's just a guess since I've seen similar data being analyzed in a previous telco I worked at, but I don't know their exact source. The goal there was to improve the network quality. I guess you can do the same w/o GPS, but triangulation with cell towers is very coarse.
Phones are jammed full of features that get disabled or enabled on a per carrier and per country basis.
Most of those features are not user visible and are compatibility hacks - ie. "use lower profile in video calls if country = FR".
I’d imagine that the carrier will agree not to use any data they do receive for anything but a handful of purposes, but I suppose that depends on the extent of the technical solution.
"and notify the user when such attempts are made to their device."
We aren't going to remove the security state. We should make all attempts to, but it won't happen. What needs to happen is accountability. I should be able to turn off sharing personal information and if someone tries I should be notified and have recourse. This should also be retroactive. If I have turned off sharing and someone finds a technical loophole and uses it, there should be consequences. The only way to stop the rampant abuse is to treat data like fire. If you have it and it gets out of control you get burned, badly.