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Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics (www.404media.co)

submitted 2 weeks ago by otter@lemmy.ca to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I don’t think this would be technically useful to prevent exploitation of location data. The handset always has to identify to a tower using the SIM card, which is going to identify the phone and its user. Your cellular service provider can still sell this information to data brokers.

With that said, I would love the option to lie about my location to apps that have no business knowing it.

[–] pirat@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

You have the option to spoof/fake/mock it manually with an app. This one, it seems, even has some available add-ons for mocking UnifiedNlp data and more...)

Mock my GPS (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location/

Mock my GPS UnifiedNlp Backend (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location.service.microg_nlp_backend/

Mock Silently (mock the GPS and Network location providers) https://f-droid.org/packages/com.github.warren_bank.mock_location.silently/

Possibly you'll have to enable dev options and set the location spoofing app in there. At least, I remember seeing the option in there, but that was years ago.

[–] henfredemars@infosec.pub 2 points 1 week ago

This changes location reported to applications by the OS. It doesn't change that your signal is coming from a direction and distance as known by the tower tracking the phone. MIMO and other beamforming techniques use this data to boost signal, but it is also collected for monitoring.