Comment by gszr

> Any other related rererences - the tech that enables this sort of tracking?

It's everywhere in mobile devices. It's better not to use them.

If you must use one, you must at least have root to disable AGPS + add stringent iptable rules to disable any outgoing communication by default: you should only enable connections per app, or per IP/domain for what you need.

Still, that'll be of a limited help since the baseband manages connections (3GPP profiles etc) and does the equivalent of NAT to your device.

For all I know, the baseband could tell android "location disabled? sure thing!" while still getting GPS fixes + sending the position by UDP packets processed by the baseband OS: Android won't even see it! Yet by virtue of sharing the same IP (or being "enriched" with your IMSI as you can see above), you will be totally trackable.

Doing anything more requires running free software on the baseband: there're now free-software firmwares like https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk (I'll submit that for discussion)

It started from initiatives like https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/hflat0/pine... but now you even have a free software bootloader for the modem (see https://github.com/Biktorgj/quectel_lk)

If you want, you can also recover the stock firmware (https://github.com/Biktorgj/quectel_eg25_recovery), but the ability to audit from top to bottom to disable data exfiltration requires a 100% free software solution.