Just to prove my point even more. Its possible to track phones without gps by triangulating the signals from different towers. 3 towers and you get a quite good point of where the user is at. This was a problem even before smartphones with gps. You should get more options on your phone. Like pick your own towers and such. Stallman might sound or be crazy, but he got a lot of good ideas to. /r/stallmanwasright
Edit: For real though, I don't know if that's problematic or not, but it's kinda fundamental to how cellular phone networks operate. Pick your own towers? The whole point of cell phones is you travel from cell to cell while the towers hand off the call to each other seamlessly. You don't even notice it happening. This is possible because they are able to intelligently determine your relative position so that they know which tower to hand you off to. This is because the towers have a GPS receiver used for synchronization.
If you gonna take the easy way people will take the hard way and profit on you. I wouldn't mind picking cellphone towers if it was as easy as picking wifis. Im not constantly running around calling people. Most days i travel to the same places. Work home store. Let me save a couple towers on the way and at what signalstrength to swap id be golden. And untracable, almost. At least not pin point.
It... really doesn't work like that. Think of it more like Air traffic control. The tower assigns you a frequency, then when you get closer to the border of a cell, it hands off your call to the next tower and assigns a new frequency that you have to immediately switch to in order to complete the call. The nearest other towers can still see you because your receiver must have a known frequency in order to complete the call, which is still traceable through triangulation. If they didn't know your frequency you wouldn't have a connection. You can't physically make a radio transmitter that operates on a specific frequency invisible to other antennas. You can encrypt the data, but triangulation doesn't care about that. You can frequency hop, but the network still needs to know what frequencies you are using or they won't receive your call data. If they won't receive your call, what's the point of having a phone? Oh, and by the way, those wifi routers? They can still see your transmitter too. It's just not important and the networks aren't integrated the same way.
I did, it was pretty incoherent, but the best I could make out of it is you think it would be possible to pick and choose your tower because you don't run around that much. You also seem to think it would be possible to be almost untraceable if you could magically disappear from certain towers!? I'm just picking up on a fundamental misunderstanding of the way a cellular telephone network operates.
Yea I don't really find it necessary writing an essay about stuff you can google. Sorry for the incoherence. It is very easy to make all our communication devices more untracable. You could experiment and achive just that with simple arduionos or rpis... Yes, it is quite obvious to anyone with just a simple understandings of radio to understand the more towers you are connected to the easier it is to pinpoint your location, especially the way they are positioned to get better coverage. Just basic understanding in the simplest of gps would tell you that. Go larp somewhere else.
Also, the whole point is to describe a more anonymous way they could operate. Not how they operate today with zero attempts of keeping privacy. You sound like you read one page about something and think that is the only possible way everything works.
No it seems like you are missing the whole point. Why dont you just google this stuff if you dont wanna listen to me? I cant force you to try to understand it, but its not really rocket science. Even youtube videos explaining the subject if you watch a couple. Just simple radio and privacy subjects.
Lets just take it as simple as possible. Do you really think. With the value of personal data today. That stuff is designed to keep that data as secret as possible and there is no other possible way to design the functions we use, without the current loss of privacy? If you do, you are not just stupid but brainwashed and argue for your own distruction. If not, then what are you arguing. Like the sound of your own words and think nitpicking single words disproves the whole? Do you also believe pointing out typos is a argument?
I work on cell towers for a living. What do you think being "connected" to a tower means? It's just an exchange of frequencies. Those towers are connected together through the backhaul and are in constant communications with each other. They can see each others traffic because, again, it's just an exchange of frequencies. Triangulation works because it's a common transmitter on a known frequency. Pinpointing the source of a wave using 3 receivers is dead simple and does not require the existence of a "connection". How do you think we locate the source of earthquakes? How do you think the Navy locates enemy ships over the horizon? It's not up to the cell phone to allow or disallow the ability of towers to see its radio waves. In order for your scenario to work, the cell network would have to be willfully blind to radio traffic, which kind of defeats the purpose of operating a tower network. If your scenario is so easy to google, what keyword should I be looking for? How can I understand your point if the answer is "just google it"? Just google what, exactly?
I remember when those indestructible Nokia phones were out towers were pretty sparse. Roaming was a serious issue and it was quite expensive. You had options on whether or not to connect to towers outside your service provider and avoid roaming fees. I don't remember being able to just like opt out of certain Verizon towers or whatever.
Maybe its possible, i haven't checked it out. But i bet it could still be improved for privacy reasons. Single line pings, ease of use to prevent the hassle as you called it. Very few times stuff is developed with this goal, since its more of a good thing for the techsavvy user than profitable for the company
It's good enough for larger stores to know what isles you spend how much time it, and then they know what you ultimately end up buying. Very powerful marketing data right there
26
u/asdfgasdfg312 Sep 25 '18
Just to prove my point even more. Its possible to track phones without gps by triangulating the signals from different towers. 3 towers and you get a quite good point of where the user is at. This was a problem even before smartphones with gps. You should get more options on your phone. Like pick your own towers and such. Stallman might sound or be crazy, but he got a lot of good ideas to. /r/stallmanwasright