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Comment by rscale | Hacker News Reader

It's likely my own ignorance, but I don't understand the concern you're raising. What's the relationship between frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology and communication/antenna records?

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"Each time a user interacts with the mobile phone operator network by initiating or receiving a call or a text message, the location of the connecting antenna is recorded"

CDMA allows multiple towers to handle network traffic. Implying there's only one tower handling the traffic seems flawed to me. I could be wrong though. This was the issue I was trying to bring up.

Any number of towers might be in range of a phone, but (from my understanding) only one tower (with the strongest signal) is used by the cellphone. As the cellphone moves, it can be handed off to other towers (based on signal strength).

Multiple towers is worse than one. It allows pinpointing the user much more accurately. With three towers with signal strength and timing information you'll get exact location.

Yes, you're wrong. There's a data link from the phone to one tower when setting up a call or similar - the ID of that tower is communicated to the core network. You can handover to another tower if that signal becomes stronger (e.g. you're moving) - this'll just give you more information, i.e. the fact that the user was moving, and you can now narrow down the location further to the parts where the two cells overlap in coverage.

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