But they know from every police procedural TV show under the sun that you can have your location tracked by your cell service.
Same way TV used to always show a landline call taking 30 seconds to be "traced" and the criminal would always hang up right before...
lol, of course they know about it. they know about read receipts too.
Their friends tell them. then they get creeped out and figure out how to turn things off.
Generally you will need to be rooted to change the MAC address.
Despite all this, if it came to overthrow a surprise dictatorship tomorrow qI'd still expect almost everybody, myself included as well as a majority of hn readers almost as big as that amongst the general population, to naively show up at the street riots with their devices happily logged into the network. But not a single one of them would do so because they believed that toggling the GPS feature to off somehow protected them.
I agree this would be common but lower percentages after the George Floyd protests got a LOT of widely-circulated warnings on social media, and then a bit later a ton of right-wingers were getting rounded up for January 6th. I think those were eye opening for a lot of the people for whom this is likely to be relevant.
Meanwhile the intersection of “hasn’t heard this” and “is intentionally turning off location services on phones” is, I imagine, an extremely small cohort of the phone using population. But this would be a good sort of public poll to do!
yeah. most people don't know they're supposed to care about the amount of just how little to no privacy they really don't have anymore. general awareness to the function of a tap-on tap-off feature like this, something that's, with a staunch juxtaposition, not currently infringing nor bearing any matter to whatever social-media-esque consumption they're filling their eyes-on-screen time with as they go about living a naive inspired blissful existence, their attention no doubt occupied by and kept busy with literally any and every other thing.
:/
Think about when you open a private window in Chrome. There's a clear warning that your ISP or school or employer may know what websites you visit anyway. But there's no such warning for smartphones. It just says "Location: Off" and people don't know.
Linked from Location Setting.
But it doesn't mention carrier tracking your location. That is fundamental to how cell phones work, though, unless you enable Airplane Mode.