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Comment by opless | Hacker News Reader

Not all phones have access to baseband controls, and I’ve never seen a “turn off 2G” option, but yes you can turn off 3/4G.

It’s easy to get a burner phone in some countries, but many you need a passport or government-issued ID to even get a prepaid SIM! Let alone a phone!

Governments really don’t like citizenry to be anonymous.

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For example on my LG V30, I can go to the dialer and enter :

    *#*#4636#*#*

I can then go into "Phone info" and set the radio to "LTE only" or "LTE/WCDMA", and if there is no 2G/3G/etc... I will not be have any service. [1]

This also works for most android phones, with small exceptions.

[1] : https://ibb.co/JvZVHXF

Not all phones are android;)

Presumably someone that really cares about privacy would use an Android :)

If someone really cared about privacy, you’d not be using cellular technologies at all ;)

Also there’s other ways of leaking your IMSIs, EAP-SIM and carrier wifi for example.

No idea yet how widespread the implementation is as I’m teaching myself all of this in my spare time!

EAP-SIM and Carrier WiFi is also not very difficult to disable. In any case, an IMSI leak is not as bad as an IMEI leak.

I think you May have that backward. But why do you think this?

Because the IMSI is changed much more easily than the IMEI, and if in LTE only mode is only temporary.

Also ... define “not difficult to disable” when it’s not exposed in the UI.

A *# code doesn’t count here also ;)

For me, not difficult to disable means that it takes less than 15 minutes to do so. difficult to disable would take hours and require specific knowledge.

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