Mobile carriers can get your GPS location
46 points by juliethefoxcoon
46 points by juliethefoxcoon
it's not that they can, but they also regurarly do so, get a friend in police, it's a regular thing for some departments :)
even better, if you have iphone or digital sim, you cannot turn off location sharing
Uh, I’d like a better source for the claim that modern iPhones send precise GNSS location to the cell provider automatically when asked. That sounds completely bonkers.
I'm also suspicious of the claim. I don't think the Apple Support article directly equates "precise location" to GNSS location. The radio layer of cell networks gives the network provider a lot of precise timing and angle values that could be used to determine the UE's position. I'd imagine that the information used for beamforming is also useful for precisely locating a given phone. Apple's new feature might be reducing the precision of timing values to make the error bars larger on the phone's location.
Worth noting in the linked support article:
The limit precise location setting doesn't impact the precision of the location data that is shared with emergency responders during an emergency call.
Given the architecture of the privacy evaluations (see the specification in my other comment if you're unfamiliar), if the network LCS client has the Privacy Override Indicator (which is validated by the network, not by the UE!), the iPhone will still give provide accurate location data.
You can refer to the specification 3GPP TS 23.271, § 9.5 Privacy.
The R-GMLC (Requesting Gateway Mobile Location Centre) authenticates the client and the H-GMLC (Home) will perform a privacy check (see figure 9.1). You can see the diagram for when the client has a privacy override capability (i.e. emergency services or the goverment) in figure 9.1a.
The policies are not stored/evaluated on the User Equipment (from a network design perspective, this makes sense since the UE are least trusted).
It's possible Apple has implemented their own logic on the modems for LCS permissions, but it seems unlikely.
Ah, so it's done in the core/SDM/application layer of mobile networks. I have some exposure to the transport/radio one and never heard about anything like that.
The modems can report restricted location capabilities (or none), but the specification does not establish any mechanism for the UE itself to dynamically report capabilities based on authentication/permissions/privacy settings.
It's actually not clear to me how Apple is accomplishing what they claim — emergency services still get most precise location whereas network operators don't at the device level — since all the permission architecture is evaluated by the network.
I do not want to sound dismissive of the article, but the title is: yeah, we know. TV shows has taught me that, And the fact that GPS works in my cellphone is kind of indication that cell towers know where I am.
The start of the article:
In iOS 26.3, Apple introduced a new privacy feature which limits “precise location” data made available to cellular networks via cell towers.
is the real and cool news.
At the same time, I kind of not expected this level of survelliance given how Android asks me if I want to share precise or loose location to apps. It seems it only applies to apps.
GPS doesn't use cell towers for positioning.
Your statement is true but there is more to the story with smartphones. On iOS, Location Services (which many people think of as "GPS") is more than GPS since it also uses a database of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cell site identifiers near you to get a rough location and make it quicker to acquire a GPS lock. As far as I know, Android works similarly.
(Aside: interestingly, cell sites use GPS for positioning [and timing])
I thought this was a given - isn’t it meant to be used to locate people who call emergency services? Or is that meant to be a behaviour driven by the phone?