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Comment by kornhole | Hacker News Reader

F-droid is an app store that carries only FOSS apps that do not have any Google API's. These apps are generally safe. Some may require your location such as maps to function. The difference with most of these mapping apps based on OSM.org is that they do not transmit your location anywhere.

You can still install other proprietary location harvesting apps on your phone. If you do so, you are just minimizing the number of data harvesters.

To ensure nobody but you knows where you are: 1. Have only safe apps installed. 2. An OS that does not send your location to Google, Apple, or others 3. Your SIM must not be transmitting to the Telco's. This means no SIM or airplane mode.

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You can make emergency calls without a SIM card. The phone identifies itself to the network (with IMEI), even if there is no SIM. The telcos, obviously, map IMEIs to SIMs. (Perhaps needless to say, but for basic operational purposes they have to quite efficiently triangulate your position, to know which cell tower to instruct your phone to use.)

Having no SIM does not help you conceal your phone's location at all, only perhaps to make it harder to map it to your identity.

I don't know if any location data might leak in airplane mode, but I would not be surprised if some did, for example, through NFC or Bluetooth.

> I don't know if any location data might leak in airplane mode, but I would not be surprised if some did, for example, through NFC or Bluetooth.

Not sure about NFC, but at least BT gets disabled in airplane mode.

Bluetooth stays enabled on iOS in airplane mode. You have to disable Bluetooth separately.

Weird choice for a "stop all radios" toggle to not stop a certain radio.

This depends on what airplane mode means on your phone. With GrapheneOS, airplane mode blocks baseband transmission, but you can optionally still turn on Bluetooth and/or WIFI. If you dial 911, airplane mode is immediately turned off for the call to go through and stays off until you turn it back on.

WIFI triangulation or bluetooth mesh can be used for location tracking in particular areas. MAC address randomization and generic phone ID makes this more difficult, but broadcasts of known devices in WIFI or bluetooth scanning can give you away.

Others may know more than me on this.

> If you dial 911, airplane mode is immediately turned off for the call to go through and stays off until you turn it back on.

I didn't know that, that's really smart and so simple. I like it. I don't know why such trivial thing is so amazing to me.

> I don't know if any location data might leak in airplane mode, but I would not be surprised if some did, for example, through NFC or Bluetooth.

Which is why hardware kill switches are the future (see Librem 5 and Pinephone).

The future of never happen.

The worlds worst privacy offenders make/sell phones. Google. Samsung. Apple.

Google, no need to explain.

Samsung? All their apps, their keyboard, collect, collect collect.

Apple? Walled garden of share data with Apple.

And beyond this, for example on Samsung builds, the GPS daemon calls home(Qualcomm? looked into it a year ago...) to update agps data, but also... provide tracking info.

None of these people want hardware kill switches.

Which is why we should support the ones I listed.

You forgot the IMEI.

Unless you wrap that phone in a Faraday sleeve, what you mentioned does not prevent tracking.

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