Comment by tekstar

A dumb phone can be localized by cell triangulation. The US military disclosed that it was using such a technique in Afghanistan to locate Al-Qaeda targets (they disclosed this because Al-Qaeda had gotten so paranoid about he accuracy of US military operations that they had assumed they had human spies on the ground feeding the US information and began killing civilians on suspicion of spying).

> Would it be possible to fool the triangulation from the device, by arbitrary (or intelligently) delaying the mobile radio signals?

Not without messing up your ability to make and receive calls. Cell towers use precise timing and power-level measurements in order to do things like decide which cell-site is best, and to hand-over your call from one tower to the next without breaking your call or glitching.

Edit: Even if you were to play around with timing of responses of the radio signal, you have no control over how it radiates in free space. The time-delta between reception of the same signal by 3 towers at known locations is enough to triangulate your position. Maybe a unidirectional antenna pointing to just one tower might work, if there are no other towers within the beam behind it and no sideway leakages.

With highly directional antenna and carefully selecting your position, you could try to have your signal only to be heard by a single cell tower at the time. The network would get your distance from the tower, but with direction info from just one tower would be less accurate.

Expanding this, you could have N directional antennas pointed to N cell towers, and some individual delays on each of those antennas, it might be possible to fool the network triangulation. Such a setup would look highly suspicious if you were carrying it around, and it definitely wouldn't fit in your pocket.

There are no available cellphone radio baseband computers/transceivers that allow you do do things with that. You would literally have to implement the entire cell baseband from scratch with a software defined radio. It would be a very non-trivial project.

And it'd be useless unless you had many of these custom transmitters faking your signal spread out over large physical distances.

Yeah they know where you are at any given moment, but they don't have to record it. And they especially don't have to sell it to third parties. That's what we mean by "tracking".

So basically either give up your right for privacy or don't use any new technology? That doesn't look practical. A better idea would be to ban cell carriers (and anyone else) from using location data for anything except explicitly permitted by law, like help in emergencies or conducting investigations.

There's no need for lead sealed box, Faraday cage will do. :) I think they even sell phone casing Faraday cage nowadays.

Even simpler: don't want to be tracked? Don't have a mobile phone.

Unless your car has similar technology.

This isn't a user-gated permission but an Apple-gated one. Apps can't retrieve the nearby SSID list unless they have the "Hotspot Helper" entitlement from Apple. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension/n...