Say that you're walking down the street and that two robbers hit the cellphone store across the street. One of the robbers is shot, they leave the store and the bullet-catching robber goes to the ER. Then, two days later, the cops contact you and ask if you saw anything.
How did they know you were there? They did a "geofence warrant" and asked Google for information of anyone nearby the scene of the crime. Bet you have Google Maps or Waze or any other app that uses Google Maps on your phone. Most people do.
You can avoid that happening, if you choose. One way is to shut off location services. A more user-friendly way is to ensure that your apps use location services only when they're open on your phone (you do routinely closebackground apps, don't you).
(H/T)
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4 comments:
Easy way is to put the damn thing in a faraday case.
Reason is not everything can be turned off and
insurance that it is really off as many phones
never really completely turn off.
FYI you still can be geofenced if you stopped and took
a selfie and had location services enabled for actual
camera use. Gets worse if you stored it on the cloud
as then you {your phone] needed to talk to the cloud
and that has location service related attributes. There
are a long list of applications you might use that
expose your location that way.
Things like that means if your really doing
communications security you insure it (the
phone) can't communicate by:
Leaving it home
Powered down (battery removal]
Faraday box (not those gray plastic bags)
Oh, and everyone around you did same.
You don't have yours but your friend(s) did
have theirs.
Eck!
Worse is when your presence near a crime scene, and subsequent movements immediately afterward, make YOU a suspect. Remaining to be seen is whether 5G, needing more mini-towers more densely located, will make that problem better or worse.
That's... not how geofencing works. It uses the E911 system's ability to triangulate cell phone towers, which doesn't rely on any software running on your phone. There's been proposals to add the GPS location from your phone's GPS chip to the periodic pings that are being triangulated for E911, but thus far that hasn't been done.
So closing your apps won't stop this. You'll need to turn off your phone and carry it in a faraday bag, and that sort of renders it useless.
What sucks is, as Sikhandtake mentions, being near a crime scene might make you a suspect for no other reason than that the cops can prove you were there in the area.
All of this makes me ROFL about the people who think the COVID-19 vaccine is injecting tracking chips into people. Why would the Feds need to inject tracking chips into people, when people voluntarily haul around tracking chips everywhere they go anyhow?
Yes, but they’re serving the subpoenas on Google, not the carriers.
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