Privacy advocates got access to Locate X, a phone tracking tool which multiple U.S. agencies have bought access to, and showed me and other journalists exactly what it was capable of. Tracking a phone from one state to another to an abortion clinic. Multiple places of worship. A school. Following a likely juror to a residence. And all of this tracking is possible without a warrant, and instead just a few clicks of a mouse.
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That does not sound like a viable long term solution to me.
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It also won’t work since the service has enough precision to know whether you go in, and for how long. The real issue is that mobile phones are continuously broadcasting their location to any device that wants to listen, even if you turn wifi and bluetooth off.
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Or - OR, right, everyone can turn off location and WiFi on their phones.
It’s true the cell ping is always going, but that’s a different thing and definitely not what this tool is using to track people. Odds are good it’s using facebook or some other cancer to perform this evil.
I don’t think cellular location would be excluded from such tracking tbh. I would rather not take my phone with me at all when visiting such a potentially sensitive place, or at the very least use a Faraday cage.
That would be a better approach, of course.
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The problem is turning off wifi doesn’t actually turn off the wifi, it just stops a subset of packets being broadcast and won’t trasmit any data you want it to send. Among other things this is how ‘find my device’ works with the wifi and bluetooth “off”. They’re actually on.
You can turn this wifi and bt scanning/‘location accuracy improvements’ off though, at least on android. It’s tucked away in the settings but once it’s done, it’s done.
That won’t work. But if you install the ROM without gapps or closed source software, you don’t have to worry about these issues.
Having just done that for the first time I feel confident in saying anyone who’s still using facebook or Xitter or tiktok or whatever - is not going to do that. I wish they would but that’s an order of magnitude more technical than where they are.
Counterpoint - the only reason I didn’t degoogle earlier was because my phone simply didn’t support Lineage or Divest. Chances are that whatever budget Chinaphone you have would be in the same situation. Now I bought a Pixel specifically with the intent of installing a privacy-preserving OS, but for a while most I could do was ADB-disabling Google services.
Unlike installing Linux, chances are high that a degoogled OS wouldn’t work on the hardware you already have.
Oh it took me a solid month of trial and error, scrolling through xda and other forums reading every how-to and watching plenty of vids and I finally got it to work. But it was not even fun. Yes starting with a Pixel is better, but f* teh googlez.
Right now. But maybe not forever and so regulation to make sure that we canor even better, regs against this tracking. Because it shouldn’t be necessary.