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Comment by paulie_a | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know of a way to simply fake location data? I genuinely don't care if it is technically illegal. Data collection has jumped the shark at this point

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Have your calls forwarded to a service you can answer from your computer. Securely strap your phone to the back of an outdoor cat. Be sure to set a strong passcode so the cat can't use the phone. To keep the phone charged, invent a charger that can convert the kinetic energy of the cat's attempts at walking away from the phone. Use the money earned from your invention to buy more phones.

You could harvest the energy to charge the phone from a perpetually rotating cat by strapping a piece of buttered toast to its back.

I believe this method is patented and isn’t due to expire for another 12 years.

I doubt that there's any way to fake location based on cell towers. That's all done in the baseband radio, which is not readily user accessible. And even if you could mess with it, it's probably very illegal. It's certainly illegal to spoof mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) because that allows theft of service.

It's much easier to disable GPS location capability. But even that's not very reliable, because there are multiple software levels, most of which aren't user controllable.

The best option that I know is turning devices off, and keeping them in Faraday bags, except when in use. So you get to pick which locations get reported. You're less reachable, but that's a necessary tradeoff. For long-term storage in Faraday bags, it's important to remove the battery, because otherwise the device may drain it, trying to ping towers, even though "turned off".

> I doubt that there's any way to fake location based on cell towers. That's all done in the baseband radio, which is not readily user accessible. And even if you could mess with it, it's probably very illegal.

Also, it would probably cause your phone to simply stop working as a phone - cell towers need this location data for their fundamental operations as a cellular system.

Yes, good point. So if you care about cell towers, you can just nuke the radio, and use only VoIP via WiFi. But even that's iffy, I think, given difficulty controlling apps. And finally, even if all that works, you don't really have a "phone" anymore.

Is having your phone on airplane mode the same as it being turned off? (still trying to ping towers regardless?)

Also, if a phone has no antenna/no data connectivity/no GPS, but has wifi functionality. What is tracking situation there? I assume one could forward calls to the phone through wifi or is that a terrible idea?

About airplane mode, I'm not sure.

About the wifi-only phone, I recall an old guide from Mike Perry about configuring Android devices to use only wifi.[0] But Copperhead is gone, so ???

0) https://blog.torproject.org/mission-improbable-hardening-and...

Wifi only won't help because other peoples phones have precisely geotagged the location of wifi hotspots, and your phone is likely reporting wifi signal strength to the mothership.

Ah, yes. So basically, you can't use your main phone anywhere and for anything that you don't want linked to you. You need one or more secondary phones, purchased as anonymously as possible. Each of those must only be used in specific locations for specific purposes, and otherwise stored in a Faraday bag or box. Perhaps only once, as a "burner phone". In other words, phone use must be compartmentalized. If it matters to you, anyway.

For this case you are out of luck since the network provider tracks you through their cell towers.

For spoofing data for apps, if you are on android and have a rooted device there is xposed with xprivacy

https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3034811

https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua

Root won't help, the modem has its own OS.

Of course it won't. even if you could it would not matter because the cell towers know where you are.

My mentioning of xprivacy was only to further knowledge that you can at least spoof data for the software side (apps installed on the device)

This may have changed with android P but AFAIK you don't need root to spoof location data.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lexa.fakeg...

I personally have used this app to fool certain retail apps to check in-store prices of items.

i think these solutions use the debug api, not sure.

xprivacy allows for spoofing all kinds of data like phonebook, calendar, even allows to not expose the clipboard.

if only gps data is relevant, this non rooted solution is of course easier to set up.

You can fix your GPS coordinates on certain phones. See this presentation for more information https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1VttfQFTWE

He talks about being able to fix your GPS coordinates to static values. Also being able to fix your list of cell phone towers so you never end up on someone's femtocell. There's also a really cool cell proxy setup for fully anonymous calling via a proxy cellphone

Good information, but useless for what we're talking about here.

The location data that the cell phone companies are selling is gathered by the cell towers for the fundamental operation of the system. It doesn't come from GPS.

Rule of thumb: If you're emitting a signal (wifi, cell, bluetooth, smoke, etc...) you can be tracked. How accurately only depends on the number of receivers.

As far as I know some custom ROMs support GPS spoofing, either with fake data or blocking it. But instead you usually get worse camera drivers and some security features may stop working.

All of this doesn't matter for network providers since they will always have your location data, by design of GSM network.

The best way to avoid location tracking is to have your primary number be google voice that forwards to your cellphone and never give out your primary number for any reason. If whoever is stalking you doesn't know your real number, they can't pull your location data.

1. I’m not sure most people’s primary concern is stalking - though this would seem to be a solution

2. From a privacy perspective adding google into the loop seems counter productive

3. The cell phone company can still sell you location data to data brokers based on your name, address, social etc....

The person I know who had this problem was getting stalked and fixed it via the Google voice trick. Sure the government might know where you are, but what does a person with a private detective level of sophistication have access to? I guess one way to find out would be to hire a red team to see if they could find the person using data brokers.

The cell phone operator knows exactly to which base station your phone is connected to. You can't spoof that because then your cellular network stops working.

To anonymize at least buy a burner Sim and run a voip client on your handset over 4g

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