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Comment by rosywoozlechan | Hacker News Reader

there's no "actual phone lookup platform" you can't get a person's location by knowing their phone number, that's a huge privacy violation. You can get the location of your own phone via icloud or google's system for android. You could also install an app on your phone to track your phone's location. You cannot find people based on knowing their phone number, that would be a serious safety issue for you know people trying to not, for example, get murdered by their ex-boyfriends.

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There’s no public one. But, data brokers have this info, and share it. Internally, a lot of companies can do this. So, it’s not far-fetched.

Doing that for an open-ended phone number anywhere in the world seems like somebody's full time job to maintain. You'd probably need some database that ties together disparate data sources. Confidence in accuracy probably varies. The best source to use probably also changes.

I feel like somebody googling for a quick code snippet to do that in a single POST request should be aware of how challenging the problem space is. That would be a hint for joe random developer that they've come up with a bad idea and should work on something else. But I probably expect too much.

Are you saying it's routine for cell phone companies to sell live fine location data to the highest bidder? Can I get a source on that? Horrifying if true, enough to make me switch back to landlines.

Back in 2008 I was working with a company in the UK that had an API to do this with O2. It only provided a rough area of where the user was, as it was based on which (single) cell tower the user was connected to.

I'd imagine today MIMO data is good enough to triangulate a very accurate (metres) position.

5G MIMO is sub millimetre 3D accurate to microsecond timing given a good tower time reference.

I've heard anecdotes about this for a while. Here are a few:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/nepxbz/i-gave-a-bounty-hunte...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/01/t-mobile-sprint-...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/6/18214667/att-t-mobile-spri...

Here is a Last Week Tonight piece on the topic in addition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqn3gR1WTcA

That is widely known about and freely available to the public, maybe. There are multiple options available for pseudo-LE types with relatively lax access prerequisites.

https://www.robertxiao.ca/hacking/locationsmart/ is an example of one provider's public demo (requiring only a phone number) being used to provide non-consensual location data.

I know a sketchy resporg that used locationsmart, there's a "consent" bit but it's basically honor system

it's been reported numerous times that you can buy real-time cell phone location data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20506624, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32143256. you might need a little more info than just a phone number, but (allegedly) not that much more.

Yea, I think this "want" is pointing to the massive tsunami of spammer/scammer script kiddies that ChatGPT is enabling.

Reverse phone number lookup usually refers to finding a residential/business address tied to a phone number (historically a landline phone, but cell phones are also owned by people who have addresses), not the literal GPS location of the phone.

I think white pages are still a thing, no?

For the young 'uns - the white pages were part of the physical phone book in every city. You got a new phone book delivered to your doorstep each year for free. Yellow pages listed the phone numbers of every business, white pages listed the phone numbers of the residents.

The crazy part is: almost everyone added their numbers voluntarily to the white pages, because you wanted people to be able to easily find and reach you.

> The crazy part is: almost everyone added their numbers voluntarily to the white pages, because you wanted people to be able to easily find and reach you.

The default was that your number would be in the phone book, it was not voluntary. If you wanted an unlisted number, you had to pay for it.

This is even crazier.

For reference: I'm old enough to remember using landlines and white pages, but not old enough to have ever had a landline at my own address.

I moved to San Francisco in 1999, my early 20s, and got a landline. Cell phones were not yet the norm, and I really didn’t have much interest in having one until a girlfriend of mine insisted I get one in 2000.

If I remember correctly, Pac Bell had a “opt in” white pages phone number removal which was not charged, but my parents just a few years prior had to pay for theirs with Pac Bell.

You would have to be like <15 to not remember landlines.

> I think white pages are still a thing, no?

Rural NY; yes. I've gotten a very, VERY thin White/Yellow Pages in the past year. Barely anybody in the White Pages section, a majority of it is Yellow Pages and a majority of that is nearly full-page ads for national services, not local providers.

Don't tell Whitepages

https://www.whitepages.com/reverse-phone

> Whitepages free reverse phone lookup service allows you to enter a phone number and quickly find out who called you. Find the phone owner's full name, address, and more.

[snip]

> Anyone can do a reverse lookup to identify cell phone, residential, and business numbers for free.

That, or you could get a normal white pages and process it using some sort of data processing tool... nah, that's science fiction.

The service doesn't seem to work very well at doing what it says, but that's not the important part. The important part is that what ChatGPT is describing is being able look up the current location of a cellphone, not the owner's address.

Yeah only the government can do that.

What about phone numbers corresponding to a specific location?

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