Comment by yosito
8 years ago
Has anyone suggested a practical way that people can avoid being tracked? (Aside from Airplane Mode or keeping your phone in a Faraday Cage)
8 years ago
Has anyone suggested a practical way that people can avoid being tracked? (Aside from Airplane Mode or keeping your phone in a Faraday Cage)
I see a lot of suggestions about reducing or shutting off your signals, but what about boosting them in certain directions? As far as I understand cell tower triangulation, having a stronger signal in one direction might offset your calculated position in that direction. I wouldn't expect that to decrease connectivity, just require special equipment and more battery life.
Interesting concept, although I don't even want my general vicinity to be tracked or shared without my consent.
There's no way to do this without using your own antenna network. Even then, you need encryption just to anonymize your calls, but if you end up talking to people subscribed to the same carriers you're trying to avoid, you can trivially be de-anonymized by timing attacks. So there's no good solution, unless you're willing to turn your calls to voice mail.
More practical solutions would include:
-(physically) Powered off radio unless you want to make a call. A clear drawback is that you can't receive calls.
-Satphones. I'm pretty sure satellite phone providers aren't in this yet. They could be, but my guess is that they wouldn't want to waste bandwidth triangulating their users. Also satellite-based triangulation would be much harder and less accurate, and if you use your own directional antenna and sat-tracking mount, you can avoid this altogether. Until they start installing phased array antennas or something.
-Finding a provider that doesn't sell your data to third parties. Probably the hardest of all, and you have to rely on their word.
It used to be possible to buy prepaid SIM cards with cash and not have to provide any identification. AFAIK, this isn't possible anymore. Does anyone know for sure?
The providers in our country require ID. I think there was an EU directive in 2006 that gradually forced all providers to require identification. Of course this doesn't stop criminals in the slightest, they just get second hand SIMs registered by homeless or just SIMs from outside the EU, so it was a pointless law with regards to reducing crime, but if the goal was more surveillance they did ok.
Laws are everywhere to prevent this, because without ID, a terrorist can buy a SIM card and put it in his GSM-controlled IED. Not sure how strong it is being enforced though, the terrorist can just give a homeless guy a few bucks to buy a SIM card for him. IIRC when I bought a SIM card in an Asian country I went to visit, the seller just entered her ID number into the system.
The real question being: How hard is it to bypass/cheat the identification requirement? Especially considering the US doesn't even have something like an official ID card.
They also changed this in Germany. Now you have to fill out a form to activate your SIM, but afaik nobody ever checks if the information in the form is actually yours.
If it's happening at the carrier level (triangulation via towers) there's zero you can do at the client (your phone) besides stop transmission by turning it off or placing it in a faraday cage.
It sounds like GPS units are also involved: tower triangulation is inaccurate so by carrying a phone that has no GPS you would be able to claw back a few meters.
Change the law (don't know if it is practical though).
Out of all the solutions suggested - this is the most practical. This would actually fix the problem at hand. Make it illegal for them to either obtain and/or sell this data.
Don't use a cell phone, I guess.
There is a reason that pagers are popular with drug dealers...
Assuming that you can actually get pager service where you are... Then you only get tracked when your phone goes hot and you access the network to return a call.
Use a service like Twilio or Google Voice.
This occurred to me. It solves part of the problem, in that your phone number isn't tied to a physical location anymore. But it creates a new problem in that you don't actually have a cellular connection.
And also your phone is still collecting GPS and Wifi information, which is better than tower information anyway.
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