A community for Lemmy users interested in privacy
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This does between fuck and all 🤦
Do you think they can't triangulate you with their cell tower info, especially with the tiny 5G cells?
Every cell registration that occurs provides that much more triangulation data.
Now with decades of data from towers, phones and actual GPS data the accuracy is equivalent to GPS.
I’ll take it as a win - letting a user decide not to give exact gps coordinates to the tower but forcing them to use the less accurate, more “difficult” triangulation.
Obviously theres only so much you can do, the fundamental nature of cell phones means your provider knows your location. But that doesn’t mean we need to make it easy and exact
The article mentions that.
But IMO, it's kind of insane that the protocol also kind of forces your phone to send GPS coordinates over... Like.... How the Frick is that necessary and justified at all and became part of the protocol?
I believe it is for beam forming (the tower needs to know where to send the signal
But it does not work when GPS is disabled on your phone. So, it normally has to work without it.