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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Librem/Pinephone's killer feature is going to be the baseband modem kill-switch. It's going to be the only way to opt out of this category of tracking.

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It's more practical at this point to start weaning off carrying a phone at all times. Not necessarily going off grid into the woods, just not carrying it unless you'll need it for something specific that day. I'm not sure more tech is going to solve this issue, we're just digging the hole deeper.

would the easiest thing just be a foil lined "wallet" for your phone? No signal getting in or out of a faraday cage.

The special thing about mm wave antenna arrays is that you don't need to have a phone on you to be identified by the unique fingerprint of your gait. There's enough information density in that spectrum to resolve your identity accurately even if you're not carrying a phone. And there are papers demonstrating how to do just that.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis...

That's astonishing!

Just noting that some of those articles are about mm wave devices explicitly designed as radars. But if you dig through you'll find articles geared towards "mm wave antenna arrays", which is a basically a keyword for 5G radio hardware.

I imagine people caring about that could be shopping specifically for (any) pre-5G phones and networks. Might have an effect of holding up the deprecation of 4G as the first mover network will be economically punished.

> Might have an effect

I think you vastly overestimate the amount of people that really care about this and won't just get the latest iphone/Android they can afford once their old phone's screen is too cracked and the battery too aged.

IMO: The real killer feature is the stuff Pine64 is doing with lorawan plus the phone's expansion bus.

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