With the Idaho case, it seems like the government can get a lot of info from cell towers (location) and what apps were using at what time.
Is this true? What else can they get?
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To my knowledge, they can figure out your location from cell towers because phones typically ping cell towers that are closeby. Cell towers don’t move, and so if a phone is pinging a specific tower at a specific time, odds are the user was close to that tower at that time. I’m not sure about app data.
The government gets all of the information it desires from the data that you exchange. If they want your location, they access your GPS. If they want to hear what your saying, they access your microphone. I know it sounds tin hat, but that’s the cost of convenience.
A few misconceptions here.
The government doesn’t “get” this data. Your provider stores the information for a variety of reasons and can release the information for a number of reasons to a number of people including the government with the proper paperwork.
Your phone needs to connect to a tower in order to get a signal and will usually try to make contact with more than one tower to find the strongest of signals. Each of these towers will make note that user A established a connection with tower B which belongs to company C.
This doesn’t tell me where you are, only that you connected to the tower and how strong your connection was
With one tower that could be an area of a few miles in a radius of the tower.
With two towers it becomes a line between them that could be accurate to a few hundred feet.
With three or more towers it becomes a pinpoint of -+3ft
When it comes to internet data, the tower just serves as a giant wifi router connecting you to the regular internet. If your traffic is not encrypted **anyone** can listen in from anywhere along the routing path.
It is also possible to use a device such as a stingray to fake a tower. Data would be passed from your phone through the stingray to an actual tower or the internet itself. When this is done you can listen in to the data, calls and texts of everyone connected unless it’s encrypted.
TL:DR
This isn’t exactly hard information to get. Some older devices even use it to fake GPS without a GPS chip. The government COULD be using it, but it’s far more likely just being sold to advertisers
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