Tons of "free" and crapware apps are also recording location, and sending it to data brokers.

https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-island-visitors-...

They never said "triangulate" but read phone for information. Your inner monologue swapped what was written with an already understood technical method.

And just because access to GPS has never been confirmed publicly before does not mean they previously only relied on tower triangulation.

Worked for Sprints network team before they bought Nextel. We had access to eeeeverything.

The crux of the argument seems to come from this

> It’s worth noting that GNSS location is never meant to leave your device. GNSS coordinates are calculated entirely passively.

OK so? The fact that GPS is calculated passively means nothing about the phone being asked what its position is after the fact.

The article admits this capability is no secret

> These capabilities are not secrets but somehow they have mostly slid under the radar of the public consciousness.

If the article just wants to say phones should block that ability, fine. But don't pretend this is some shady BS.

Where does the article claim this turns on the GPS if off?

Even the article mentions this.

> I have served on a jury where the prosecution obtained location data from cell towers. Since cell towers are sparse (especially before 5G), the accuracy is in the range of tens to hundreds of metres.

I've also personally witnessed murder cases locally where GPS location put a suspect to "100 meters away". The rest of the evidence still pushed the case forward to a guilty verdict, and the phone evidence was still pretty damning.

This is a system you can disable as a user, but it's not the on-modem feature discussed in the article.

It really isn't, given that the government literally has a monopoly on violence, and therefore it makes sense to have more guardrails for it. That's not to say private entities should have free reign to do whatever it wants, but the argument of "private entities can do [thing] that governments can't, so we should ban private entities too!" is at best incomplete.

>Furthermore, the issue is exacerbated by then allowing governments to bypass these issues by then just paying private entities to do the things it can’t do as a proxy for the same functional outcomes.

Again, this is at best an incomplete argument. The government can't extract a confession out of you (5th amendment). It can however, interview your drinking buddies that you blabbed your latest criminal escapades to. Is that the government "bypassing" the 5th amendment? Arguably. Is that something bad and we should ban? Hardly.

Thats basically the foundational idealogy of the united states. Thats not the issue.

The real issue is your next sentence. The government can just loophole around their intentional limitations by paying private companies to work on their behalf.

Regulations say the baseband MUST control: all wireless signals (including wifi and GPS), all microphones and speakers, and it must be able to disable the camera electrically. It must have a tamper-resistant identifier (IMEI number ... kind of).

Oh, it must allow calling the emergency services. If in this mode, during a call to the emergency services it MUST be able to send the exact GPS position (not just once, continuously) to the emergency services at the request of the emergency services (ie. NOT the user, and carriers must facilitate this)

By the way, it's worse: as you might guess from the purpose, it doesn't matter if your phone is on the "spying" carrier or not, other carriers can send commands to other carriers' phones' basebands (because "get off this frequency" is required: spectrum is shared, even within countries. Since phones may go from one tower to another and be required to vacate frequencies, you need this command). It doesn't even matter if you have a SIM in your phone or not (ever tought that if eSIM works, it must of course be possible for any provider to contact and send instructions to the phone, so it opens up an end-to-end encrypted connection to the javacard that the actual phone cpu cannot intercept). In some phones it doesn't even matter if the phone is on or not (though of course eventually it dies). So "meshtastic" or anything else cannot make a phone safe.

And in practice it's even worse. A lot of phone manufacturers "save on memory" and use the same memory chips for the baseband processor and the central cpu. Which means that it's a little bit cheaper ... and the baseband has access to all the phone memory and all peripherals connected through the memory bus (which is all of them in any recent phone). It may even be the case that these chips are integrated in the cpu (which I believe is the case for recent Apple chips). Oh and the regulations say: if there's a conflict over control over (most) peripherals, including the microphone and speaker, the baseband processor MUST be guaranteed to win that fight.

Oh and because governments demand this, but of course neither fund nor test these devices, they are old, bug-ridden and very insecure. This also means that despite the government requiring that these features be built into phones, governments, carriers and police forces generally do not have the equipment required to actually use these features (though I'm sure the CIA has implement them all). Not even carriers' cell phone towers: they have to pay extra to allow even just frequency sharing ...

Here is an article about baseband and baseband processors.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/170874-the-secret-seco...

The article touches on this by saying Apple is making the baseband/modem hardware now. Something they should have done since day one, and I’m not sure what took them so long. However, it was was clear they didn’t have the expertise in this area and it was easier to just uses someone else’s.

So I don't think a single foil sticker would make much difference.