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Comment by joering2 | Hacker News Reader

I used a simple mobile "burner" and was fine to authenticate. I bought bunch of $5 cards with cash in a small store and used this one in my dumb flip phone bought on a flea market few months ago. I am certain to a high degree that's pretty enough setup to stay under radar.

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This burner phone and your "real" phone are going to be easy to correlate retroactively based on the towers they are both hitting

Hopefully OP uses a different cell network than the one Simple Mobile rides atop.

This kind of device matching can be done across any of the carriers or their MVNOs, all of them give up the data when asked by a government entity. Many tower locations will even be identical across carriers, making the matching even easier.

Also this correlation could be done with stingray towers without bringing the cell carriers into the loop.

With the higher clustered protestors the tower linking won't be as identifiable as you might think.

It may take longer to get enough samples to filter out unwanted user associations but if you have all the data points from every tower retroactively over ~10 weeks of protest it's going to be difficult to hide.

I don't think gp here is in china, but rather just offering their procedure for acquiring a burner phone.

Depends on the standard of proof that is required.

Just to clarify - I have nothing to do with HK or the riots going. I am just stating that I was able to use my somewhat "burner" setup to register the App. What happens after that is whole different story.

I'm not the only one using my tower I am sure about that. I am not that special.

yes of course, but if the burner and your real phone establish any kind of pattern it will be obvious after the fact to anyone who can analyze the records.

this is why you remove the battery of the burner until you use it. remove the battery and sim of your compromised phone relocate yourself install sim and battery of your burner

This still creates a detectable pattern.

If the legit phone goes off while the burner is on that's a pattern. If the legit phone goes off and (travel time / distance) elapses before burner appears (travel time / distance) away from the last legit ping that's a pattern. If the legit phone and burner phone hit the same towers at the same time more than 3 times that's a pattern. If the burner phone spends most of the time off (battery out, faraday cage etc) then the times it does connect are even stronger signals.

You need to generate a ton of "noise" data where both phones are hitting different towers at the same time on a constant basis; and never being together. Maybe mailing the burner phone on a regular basis between isolated locations that the real phone never goes to?

Cell tower data is incredibly powerful for tracking people.

If you think it's bad now, wait until 5G rolls out allowing live tracking of people to within meters.

Is this baked in to the infrastructure so you can be located or baked into the phone so you can locate yourself? If the former, I would have expected more concern?

"I would have expected more concern" From the public? Everyone carries a phone, pretty much everyone is on Facebook. Given a yes/no box to tick you're going to get a lot of "yes" to "do you think you should have freedom from being tracked", but given a choice of what hardware/software to use people are going to pick the ones which everyone else is using, so that they can contact them. Next to nobody is going to stop at 4g because 5g has a higher granularity of location awareness.

the still detectable pattern depends on how often you use your phone or make the switch. its not a pattern if its done over days or if you even leave a phone cached in a special place such as a geocache so it can be swapped by someone else for a different burner.

They could turn off cellular and turn on bluetooth.

The baseband radio still communicates with the tower in airplane mode.

That's interesting. Does anyone have a further source or description of that behaviour?

It's required for emergency calls to quickly enable routing of said emergency call. They work even with no SIM or IMEI in the phone in some countries, though most western countries are starting to require SIM cards due to abuse (SWATting).

Any Links / docs discussing that? I didn’t find anything about this in a bit of searching.

You can't get "burner" SIMs in Australia (where I am), I don't think.

They usually require a sign up before activation; I'd be interested to know of ones that are true "burner" SIMs that are sold here.

Oh, you definitely can. You're just unlikely to be able to find them without already being involved in crime

The ID verification methods vary to account for channels like that you can buy SIMs from vending machines at airports and train stations and verify online https://www.acma.gov.au/theACMA/approved-methods-for-verific...

Vodafone just let you tick a box saying "i am who i say i am" https://www.acma.gov.au/Industry/Telco/Carriers-and-service-...

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