Serious question: will this limit the ability of 911 emergency services to help you?

I can imagine a scenario where emergency servies are authorized to send the ping to get your precise location and if you disable this, you may regret it. And a major feature of some phones/watches is the ability to automatically call 911 under certain fall/crash movement detection, where you might not have the ability to re-enable your GPS location.

The feature says it doesn't restrict the ability of 911 to locate you...

Apple doc: https://support.apple.com/en-us/126101

Only Boost Mobile in the U.S. Weird. About 7.5M subscribers. Maybe it requires 5G? Wonder if it works when roaming?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boost_Mobile

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operato...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR

AFAIK, other than maybe some 5G, Boost Mobile just resells service from AT&T.

Boost Mobile (under Dish Network), until a few months ago, ran their own custom-built 5G network that covered about 30% of the US population. They built it after the acquisition of Sprint by T-Mobile, in an effort to maintain a fourth nationwide wireless carrier.

Unfortunately Boost/Dish struggled significantly with finances and customer attraction post COVID, largely due to two problems (seamless roaming between their own network and partners’, and more importantly, getting manufacturers like Apple to build compatible phones). When the current president came into the picture, the FCC essentially forced the sale of Dish’s primary spectrum licenses to administration-friendly SpaceX, for future Starlink use.

As of now, they are in the process of moving their customers to AT&T (and possibly a secondary agreement with T-Mobile), but they seem to be maintaining their own network core - that’s likely why they’re able to implement support for this, while AT&T does not.

Kinda funny that the most secure phone setup in the US is an iPhone Air on Boost Mobile. Who could have predicted that!

It isn’t restricted to Boost Mobile. It is only available on devices with the C1 or C1X modem, though. I assume this is because of specifics with the third party modems that most models in the wild have vs what Apple is doing in-house with their C1(X). If you call emergency services it will still provide precise location.

>It isn’t restricted to Boost Mobile.

Why does it list specific carriers, then?

It could be a flag in the per-network CarrierConfig bundle. I imagine that would help with jurisdictions that might require this protocol for legislative reasons

It is restricted to Boost Mobile in addition to using the C1(X), at least for the purposes of this beta version.

But they still can track the cellular connection and do triangulation from that, no?

Basically, if you have any cell phone the government can track you. Buying a burner phone with cash (via strawman proxy) seems like the only way to temporarily obscure your location.

I imagine with the ubiquity of cameras in the commons and facial recognition and gait analysis they can knit that up even more.