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Comment by sys_64738 | Hacker News Reader

How does data get off my smartphone?

    * Apps
    * Carrier geolocation
    * Bluetooth tracking

Are there any others?

If I disable location tracking then am I safe? I don't install crappy vendor apps on my smartphone to begin with.

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IP address.

Most people connect to wifi at home and at work. Every app on your phone reports your current IP address. Even if you don't open an app, the app server can send it a silent push notification which wakes up the app and lets it send back your current IP address. Therefore every app knows where you live and work and when you are at those places. If you connect to wifi at friends' places or coffee shops or a hotel, they get that data, too.

This is missing from the article. It is a major omission.

iOS & Android could help reduce IP-address tracking. They could treat Internet Access as a privacy setting: require apps to ask for permission and let the user control when the app communicates (never, when in use, always). One can disable app notifications to reduce app wake-ups, but the OS does not teach users about this. Notifications are not listed under "Privacy". Also, apps can use other ways to wake up frequently and report the current IP address.

Additionally, iOS & Android could support hermetic proxy services. Currently, one can install a VPN app on iOS, but device traffic goes through the VPN only when the app is running and connected. All apps get direct access to the network (and your IP address) whenever the VPN connection is not enabled, which occurs during device restarts, VPN service outages, VPN app updates, and when switching between mobile & wifi. iOS has the ability to disable network access when the VPN is down, but setting it up is a complicated procedure which requires using a macOS device and wiping the iOS device. And there's no emergency-disable option.

Both Apple and Google ignore many easy things they could do to improve user privacy.

Certainly the phone manufacturer (and OS provider if different) can have a go at anything they want.

I'm not sure what all counts as "getting data off" the phone, but some other methods of smartphone tracking:

  - wifi (sometimes even if wifi is "off")
  - EXIF on photos you take and share
  - QR code usage
  - public USB charging ports

Then there's cross-tracking by other means. It's likely someone has enough data to associate your phone with your credit or debit accounts, or a public transit card, or vehicle plate numbers & toll tags, or with your face and voice.

Carrier geolocation is there whether you like it or not and at this point I think legislation is the only solution to making location logs illegal to keep for governments and companies. It's not really being created by your smartphone but more like observed by the carriers cell phone towers so they can do handoffs and a side effect of how the network layer works.

Also stuff like iBeacon is pretty much impossible to avoid, it still works even when bluetooth is completely turned off. I got an iBeacon based alert when I walked into an apple store with bluetooth turned off for example, and there is no setting to turn off iBeacon tracking.

Google is worse in other ways, it's incredibly infuriating.

You'll need a new SIM and handset every couple months, too.

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