I can’t believe I’ve never thought about this and that no one is really talking about it. GPS is a system that everyone uses everyday on there phone and is constantly tracking your location.
Many people here (including myself) use airplane mode to block mobile data signals so that mobile data companies cannot track your location and sell it to data brokers. But airplane mode doesn’t block GPS (I just tested this now on my phone, maybe your phone works differently). Is GPS somehow designed in a way so that it’s private?
The satellites are basically constantly yelling at the earth, and your device is just listening to their yelling. The satellites don’t know who may be listing.
GPS is not bidirectional communication, so the systems themselves (ie GNSS) aren’t tracking you just because you receive the signal. But…
- In addition to GPS, airplane mode also doesn’t shut off the Wifi or bluetooth radios; it’s usually just the cell radio.
- Your phone OS has several ways of tracking and recording your location, activities, and movements, and it generally does this at all times. For example, Find My even works when the battery on an iPhone is “dead.”
- Phones may fallback to BTLE mesh networks (like AirTags), or do background WIFI location scanning to track and record your phone’s location. Turning these off does prevent you and 3rd party apps from using the features, just not the OS.
I do prefere airplane mode allowing wifi for obvious reasons. I have a samsung and it really does suck how far baked in the spyware is. Is it possible/are there any guides that show me how to make samsung or any other phone not be able to use its spyware?
Is the only way to fix this using a custom rom or postmarketos?
For sure, it’s a valid use case… connecting to wifi on an airplane.
I can’t help on Samsung. I haven’t had one in ages.
GPS itself is receive only but if you’re really paranoid, don’t trust your phone to not store the location data and upload it someplace afterwards.
In theory, yes. But never fully trust your phone to do what you asked it to do.
The only issue is your phone collecting location data and then relaying it to somewhere in the internet.
The privacy risk is when things have location access AND internet access.
I’m fairly certain my phone is not accessing my location unless I ask it to (I have GrapheneOS). But it’s absolutely pinging my location when I open a map or upload a photo to the internet. I do those things sparingly.
Depends on the system. Typically, the older systems do not work like this. The GPS satellites only transmit a signal that contains their location information and the time. The device must collect several of these signals and then use trigonometry to calculate your real location in time and position. Yes there are relativistic effects due to the distance to the satellites and gravity.
For instance, in home lab electrical engineering, if a person wants a really good reference clock but cannot afford a cesium atomic reference, they can use a relatively cheap GPS system to build a referenced oscillator that is disciplined by the reference clock on these satellites. I think they are cesium too, but it has been awhile since Dave Jones made YT uploads on the eevblog about it. A Garmin bicycle computer is another example. It is triangulating the signals and plotting periodic waypoints with some basic averaging.
That said, WiFi routers and cellular towers are possible to use for similar triangulation. Maybe check out Hak5 if they are still around. It has been awhile since I looked them up, but they used to make pen testing red team stuff that will infer much about vulnerabilities.
AFAIK, the answer to this is yes: GPS is private because the device seeking a lock is not transmitting anything.
Satellites transmit continuous signals which are received by your device. These signals contain data about the position of the satellite and precise timekeeping metadata. Figuring out your location is a matter of comparing time of receipt to the time reported in the signal (and other similar stuff, still all reception based).
This is also why it doesn’t shut off for airplane mode. Nothing is being transmitted by your device to perform the lock; it must only receive enough data.
