Police reported ahead

Yes, that's true. But for the sake of argument, GPS on my PRIME has no way to transmit the current location to Toyota unlike the newer 2020 PRIME Premium or pre 2019 PRIME Advanced which are equipped with telematics to transmit data. So, my thinking is that GPS alone will not reveal my current location to anyone else but to myself even on a smartphone. I understand that cellular radio is used for tracking the phone location, but in this case GPS info does not get sent out. Or does it? Now, if I have a GPS enabled smartphone without SIM (thus no cellular signaling), and if I connect it with WiFi using VPN only. Would that still reveal my location to someone tracking the phone data?

 

GPS is one of the allowed ways for cellular systems to locate phones for E911 services. This also applies to dumb phones without data service, so the GPS coordinates must be able to be transmitted over the voice channels too. While your location may not be accessible to the entities relying on just smartphone app data, it is still accessible by some entities with an E911 need to know, plus anyone else who can break into whatever security is applied along the various elements of the chain. And security probably wasn't on the mind of many of the original system designers.

You don't even need to connect to any WiFi access point, or have GPS reception. All the WiFi access points within range should be able to see and record the unique WiFi identification of your device. Some are in the business of recording these contacts and tagging the location and time observed. Some of the Big Data aggregators make it their business to figure who every such unique identifier is associated with.

Not just WiFi, but BT and NFC and SIM and IMEA and ESN and anything else they can possibly get their paws on. It doesn't take much of a partial collection to narrow down an association of these to just a few, or even just one, named people.

Retail business can help collect these too from customers merely walking in, and also add credit card identifiers of customers who make purchases. And they don't need as much CC data as the thieves need to make fraudulent transactions, just enough to make unique (or somewhat close to that) associations to known IDs or to those other electronic identifiers.

 

Oh, well I was thinking of replacing my Nokia Windows Phone with an even dumber phone to prevent digital surveillance, but as long as I keep it on me with switch on, I can't escape the peeping toms.

 

The iPhone 11 has a new feature called Ultra Wideband (UWB). It's like Bluetooth on steroids. It allows you to air drop a file to another UWB enabled phone without needing wifi or cellular data. There was a recent uproar when users discovered that turning off location services didn't completely turn off location tracking. That was because UWB isn't permitted in all countries and they wanted to be able to disable that feature if a user went to one of those countries. So the phone would periodically turn on the GPS to check its location. The next version of iOS (13.3.1) is supposed to make it possible for the user to turn off UWB and the periodical location checks.

After reading up on it a little bit I'm surprised at the controversy since turning off the GPS won't keep your phone's location secret. To do that, you almost have to beat the phone into little crumbs and throw it in the ocean.

 

It is inherent in the nature of cellular service that there is some location tracking. The network has to know which cell sites the phone can talk to in order to deliver phone calls and text messages and such. This kind of locating has nothing to do with GPS. Back in the days of the dinosaurs (like the 1990's), whenever one traveled to a different cellular region (like a different county), one had to manually register your phone in the new area, so the system knew where to direct calls. Now phones automatically register when the phone moves to a new region. In the days of analog service, stealing service by cloning phones was common, and my phone was attacked, and the system caught it caught it when my number was simultaneously active in two locations 100 miles apart.

 

Exactly! They didn't design this stuff to spy on us; they did it to improve service -- or in some cases to make it possible. And then sometimes, unscrupulous people misuse it.

 

Not to get too much into it, but I find the Waze and Google Maps identical now adays... Not only are they the same company, the database seems to be the same.

And from Google Maps I get notifications of police (speed traps), disabled vehicles, crashes, road debris, all the same stuff. And it shows on the map. Additionally I can use the icon on Google Maps to report any of those same things while driving. And I report every police I see or detect on radar. Not sure why it is being argued you can't do that, because you most certainly can. And you have been able to for a looooooong time. It was only for Pixel devices even before that shortly after they bought Waze. But I've been using it on my phones for a couple years now natively in Google Maps. Interface just looks nicer to me than Waze and with the same feature set now, no reason to not use it.

 

Yup! And we have more than just a few bad apples.

As for the interface, I also like GM better than Waze. But my only problem with Google is that the fonts are a little small for the contrast level. If there was a way to get more contrast than the green and white, it would be much more legible because the distance to my phone is in between the upper and lower parts of my bifocals. Best legibility award goes to my Garmin even though it doesn't do traffic.

As for reporting stuff, I'd love to, but doing that while driving incurs a much larger risk of winding up in someone else's report -- and in the hospital.

 

What model of Garmin do you have? Mine does show traffic conditions (but no police ), although it is not always accurate nor timely.

 

The other day, a gas station I was at sounded an alert when an EMS vehicle passed close by. it was the first time I had ever heard any Pump give an emergency alert.

 

BTW, GTE MobileNet (ancestor of Verizon) ate the thousands of minutes of airtime run up on my cloned number. Recall that back then, the number of monthly airtime minutes included in ones plan was tiny (100 or so), so the writeoff was $1000 or so. From then until they went digital, I had to enter a PIN to make outgoing phone calls.

But that is off topic. My point is that the cell system has to know what cell site footprint you are in in order to do its basic functionality, and that is based on the radio, not GPS. It may only locate you to the footprint of a cell site (a couple of square miles), but it does have a general idea where your phone is.

 

Yep, but today there are so many towers your phone is constantly registering and negotiating with all of them. So you are located down to a few meters basically anywhere that isn't the boonies. The boonies are where you may only ping 1 tower and they only know your location to within a donut shaped space around the tower by using the received signal strength RSSI. They know you are at least x meters from the tower and less than y meters. But it could be any direction. In newer towers, not as likely to be in remote places anyways, all the multiple antennae know quasi direction and the RSSI per node. So they can get you down to a small donut wedge on one tower. And each additional tower gives another piece. That's how you can get GPS like accuracy with cell towers. If the phone is on, they know exactly where you are.

 

In theory, they can also figure range based on round trip time delays, especially on GSM and its successors. (CDMA might not work as well for this.) Though different latency delays through different phone models might possibly interfere with this, but these could be cataloged.

I'd think this should produce more consistent figures than signal strength measurements, especially for indoor users where attenuation through structures will be quite variable.

 

That's absolutely true. But that is spoofable. Since the phone can actually delay the transmission after receipt by a variable amount. Joe Average can't do it, but if you're trying to hide it is not that hard. But even so, they still get you pretty close. In buildings and urban areas you'll be connected to so many towers, it doesn't even matter. They can locate you inside the elevators on the 59th floor in Manhattan if they want to.

 

Signal strength spoofs should be even easier. But then, common ordinary customers won't be spoofing.

 

and yet gps can't get any closer than a 1/4 mile from my gate, and only 1 cell tower near me, I sometimes get 1 'G'.