Federal agencies use cellphone location data for immigration enforcement

Re:Federal agencies use cellphone location data for immigrat... by mindslight on Friday February 07, 2020 @07:35PM (#22272742)

Government is just doing what government inherently does - attempting to exert control over anything legible to it. The underlying problem is the longstanding insecurity of cell protocols that creates these irresistible databases of everyone's location in the first place.

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Re:Federal agencies use cellphone location data for immigrat... by icebraining on Saturday February 08, 2020 @04:48AM (#22274956)

How would you design a cell protocol that prevented signal triangulation? Seems essentially impossible.

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Re:Federal agencies use cellphone location data for immigrat... by mindslight on Saturday February 08, 2020 @12:12PM (#22276859)

Hiding the location of a radio itself is likely infeasible (with sector antennas, each tower actually knows a signal strength and a rough vector).

However, what is avoidable are fixed IDs like IMSI and IMEI that allow persistent tracking of the "same device" or "same user" across every tower. The routing functions of IMEI could easily be replaced with a nonce that changed for every registration. The billing functions of IMSI could be replaced with blinded tokens. And the persistent identity of phone numbers could be provided by independent parties like with email, ideally over a (non-wireless) mix network.

[ Parent | on HN ]