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Comment by revscat | Hacker News Reader

> I have to switch my iPhone to airplane mode

This doesn't work. The iPhone still tracks your location even when in airplane mode. To test:

1) Turn on Airplane mode 2) Take a picture 3) Turn off Airplane mode 4) Go to Photos app, "Places" tab. Note that the picture you took has been correctly geolocated.

The only way to not be tracked by your smartphone is to leave it in a Faraday device of some kind, like a refrigerator.

EDIT: Ok, not a fridge. Thanks, Titanous.

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Airplane serves to avoid transmitting; GPS receivers (like smartphones) don't transmit, therefore airplane mode doesn't disable it. That said, it should be enough to switch to Airplane mode and disable the GPS.

But cellphones is general are tracking devices par excellence. One-way pagers are safer, but the message is transmitted in clear-text.

I'm not sure that's correct. Phones don't talk to satellites for geolocation, they talk to towers. If they are talking to towers then they are not passive, but active. That means that even in airplane mode you are still being actively tracked if the phone can see a tower.

Phone with GPS - such as the iPhone - don't need to talk to anything to geolocate, they just need to listen to the incessant signals sent down by the GPS satellites.

Talking to cell towers can assist the GPS receiver[1], but it's not required.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS

Phone(or really, GPS receivers in general) don't need to talk to anything in order to figure out their location.

A refrigerator isn't a Faraday cage.

http://makezine.com/2013/06/26/edward-snowden-can-a-refriger...

A solution that's a bit more portable than a refrigerator: do a web search for "conductive fabric".

Buy some and use it (perhaps inside a lining of regular fabric) to create a pouch or a bag. Put your phone(s) in there.

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